An erudite, pan-European survey of the eraRitchie Robertson is a British academic who has published several books on German literature. With his most recent book, however, Robertson has broadened his scope to encompass the pan-European movement known as the Age of Enlightenment. Published in 2021, Robertson’s book The Enlightenment is a sweeping synthesis that attempts to, and in my opinion succeeds in, providing a comprehensive summary of the era that encapsulates the intellectual and social landscape of the period.
Not surprisingly, Robertson focuses primarily on France, Britain, and Germany, but he does often reach farther afield into many other European nations, demonstrating that this was a truly continent-wide phenomenon. The United States doesn’t get a great deal of coverage. Jefferson and Franklin are occasionally discussed, and there’s a brief section on the American Revolution. Rather than examining specific nations or specific thinkers in turn, this book is organized thematically by issue or discipline. The result is much rapid jumping around among diverse locations and historical personages, but this approach helps in gaining an understanding of the overall zeitgeist and important debates in Enlightenment thought. Figures like Immanuel Kant, David Hume, or Voltaire are mentioned in almost every subchapter. If you wanted to get an overall picture of Kant’s thought, for example, you’d have to search around for two sentences here and three sentences there, but if you did so, you’d get a very good understanding of what Kant was all about.
The one thread that tied the myriad endeavors of the Enlightenment together was a striving for an improvement in the happiness of the human race, whether it be through technology, philosophy, politics, law, or some other means. That may seem like an obvious and simplistic answer. Hasn’t mankind always striven for happiness? Well, no, not really. For much of the past two thousand years the prevailing view (at least in the Western world) was that life is an ordeal to be endured so that one could be rewarded with happiness in the afterlife. The Enlightenment is often thought of as a period of extreme secularization and rising atheism, and there definitely was some turning away from prior superstitions and religious dogma, but Robertson asserts that the religious landscape of the Enlightenment was far more complex and heterogenous than widely assumed. The trend of the age was not necessarily antireligious but rather an effort to reconcile religion with reason, to question religion and theology in order to clarify them, so that religion is the product of active thought rather than passive acceptance.
Robertson’s study is not only through but also well-balanced. This isn’t just a book about how great certain Enlightenment thinkers were and what important political and scientific advances were made. Robertson also pays attention to the prejudices, superstitions, and ignorances active during this period. He presents the progress of Enlightenment thought as a series of debates, or exercises in trial and error, and gives as much consideration to those in the wrong as those in the right.
I takes a very skilled writer and researcher to encapsulate an era in one volume like this. Robertson’s book is comprehensive enough to serve as a textbook for an undergraduate course, but it doesn’t read like a textbook. The prose is accessible to general readers, and history buffs will find much food for fascination here. Robertson’s breadth of knowledge is impressive. He seems to have read just about everything published between the two dates in the subtitle, as well as the scholarly literature of recent years. For anyone interested in this period, the notes and bibliography are a treasure trove of further readings. Though I thought I had a good idea of what the Enlightenment was all about, Robertson really broadened my understanding and heightened my interest in this pivotal age in history.
Poorly written sketches of interesting people
Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers is the American reprint of a work previously published in England in 1857 under the title Half-Hours with the Freethinkers. It is a collection of what appear to have been columns in a periodical, though the title of the journal is never named. The book provides profiles of 23 important freethinkers throughout history, a group that broadly includes atheists, pantheists, deists, and other heretics who publicly disagreed with Christian dogma. The essays are written by Charles Bradlaugh (writing under the pseudonym of Iconoclast), A. Collins, and J. Watts.
Bradlaugh was a prominent spokesman for freethought in his own right, but his writing here, and that of his colleagues, leaves much to be desired. The essays are a mixture of biographical sketches, philosophical summary, adulatory tribute, and textual excerpts. Unfortunately the authors rely far too heavily on the latter. Many of the chapters contain very little biographical content and instead rather lazily reproduce extensive and not judiciously edited excerpts of the subjects’ writings. Baruch Spinoza, for example, led an interesting life, but his chapter is mostly one big chunk taken from his Ethics, which I’d already read. One of the reasons I pick up a book like this is because I don’t want to read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry; I just want to get an idea of his philosophical thought. Bradlaugh, however, chooses to reprint page after page of Shelley’s poetry when two summary paragraphs on the poet’s freethought views would have been more useful and effective. As far as biographical content goes, the best you can hope for is maybe two or three interesting facts about each person’s life, and for some of the lesser known personages you get almost no idea of who they were. Rather than really trying to educate readers, the authors write in a “but of course you already know this” tone that is strange and off-putting.
Because of the heavy reliance on excerpts, two of the more interesting entries are about ancient authors whose written works no longer exist: Epicurus and Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism). With the exception of these two ancient thinkers and Spinoza, almost all the remaining figures are 17th or 18th century deists, meaning those who believed in an impartial creator god as opposed to the anthropomorphic Judeo-Christian deity who judges man and answers his prayers. The authors themselves are atheists, but they view the heretical thinking of these deists with admiration as necessary precursors toward modern atheism. A few of the subjects were bona fide members of the clergy who departed from church doctrine, and their excerpts tend to be long and tedious catalogs of biblical inaccuracies. Robert Taylor’s chapter consists almost entirely of Bible quotes while Joseph Barker focuses on the error-prone process of translating holy scripture. To 21st century freethinkers, this stuff is old hat and makes for a boring read, unless you are a fundamentalist Christian thinking of leaving the Church, in which case you could probably find a better book to guide you than this 19th century anthology.
I was hoping for a collection of biographical sketches, but what I got was far less interesting. The book did very briefly introduce me to some thinkers of which I was unfamiliar, and for that I am thankful. There are a few choice chapters, like the ones on David Hume or Frances Wright D’Arusmont, the only woman represented here. In general, however, the text was mostly dull and annoying. For those interested in the history of freethought, I would recommend the 1889 work compiled by Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations, a far more interesting work than this collection by Bradlaugh and company.
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Assume nothing
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| David Hume |
Published in 1748, David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was intended to be a more accessible distillation of his earlier work A Treatise of Human Nature. Given that this is a philosophical treatise written in the mid-18th century, just how accessible could it be? The answer is surprisingly so, at least for its first half. Hume explains his theory of epistemology clearly and logically in straightforward language free of undefined philosophical jargon. Each chapter builds upon the one before, so over the course of the book the concepts discussed become more complex and the line of reasoning more serpentine.
In his philosophy of human thought, Hume argues in favor of empiricism and skepticism. He asserts that we can only learn from experience. All ideas are formed from the building blocks of sensory information. Although by witnessing phenomena around us we make judgments about cause-and-effect relationships, these are merely assumptions. Because the forces by which one event directly influences another are unseen, we can never truly be 100% certain of the connection between adjacent events. Nevertheless, we can through custom or habit judge the probability of cause-and-effect relationships based on the number and frequency of like occurrences we have experienced in the past. Though he asserts that some knowledge of reality will never be attainable by mankind, Hume goes on to clarify that an excessive skepticism which overemphasizes the unreliability of ideas formed through custom only leads to a pointless end. Though mankind may ultimately be ignorant of how the world truly works, we nevertheless must rely on knowledge gained through custom in order to get through life. The important thing is to use our reason wisely and only trust in reasoning based on empirical data.
This is no doubt an important work in the history of philosophy, but is it essential reading for a 21st-century audience? I tend to be of a skeptical bent myself and agree with almost everything Hume is saying here, but in a way that makes the book less of a must-read in my eyes. Many of the points Hume makes fall under the heading of common sense, and even in this purportedly abbreviated work he has a tendency to beat those points like so many dead horses. Given that nothing can be taken for granted in philosophy, at some point someone had to address these points in a thoroughly detailed manner, and Hume certainly does that in this book. For that, we owe him a debt of gratitude. In his day, Hume’s empirical skepticism no doubt broke new ground and was considered highly heretical, but most rationalists today would probably take many of his assertions for granted. Unless you’re a philosopher looking for quotes to support your own thesis, I’m not sure this is a necessary read. The general philosophically minded reader could circumvent Hume’s verbosity and likely glean the book’s main arguments just as well by perusing a reasonably detailed summary online.
One group of readers who might find pleasure in reading the Enquiry are atheists and freethinkers. In the book’s latter chapters, such as “Of miracles” and “Of a particular providence and of a future state,” Hume shoots down a lot of faulty reasoning made in the name of God, and not without a touch of humor. Those skeptics seeking ammunition for similar arguments will find a kindred spirit in Hume.
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