“If this is the best of all possible worlds, what of all the others?”

Candide                   

“Not only scholars but also the general reading public need some awareness of the tremendous historical difficulty, struggle, and cost involved in propagating our core ideas in the face of the long-dominant monarchical, aristocratic, and religious ideologies, privileged oligarchies and elites, and in face of the various counter-enlightenment popular movements that so resolutely and vehemently combatted [them] from the mid-17th century down to the crushing of Nazism … in 1945.”

Jonathan Israel, Revolution of the Mind, vii-viii, ix                

In an eye-opening piece, shortly to appear in a collection Rethinking the Enlightenment American political scientist Dennis Rasmussen comments that “… I can think of few topics on which recent work in political theory has displayed greater consensus than on the conviction that the Enlightenment outlook is radically problematic …”. Since World War II, Rasmussen notes, “… opposition to the Enlightenment has surfaced with renewed vigour and from nearly every direction, uniting conservatives and liberals, pluralists and communitarians, postmodernists and religious fundamentalists …” All in all, Rasmussen comments: “Enlightenment bashing has developed into something of an intellectual blood-sport, uniting elements of both the Left and the Right in a common cause …”

The paradox about this situation is particularly acute. For the Enlightenment, however one looks at it, was unquestionably a period of the highest cultural importance. In the words of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, this period of European cultural history has largely determined “what we are, what we think, and what we do today.” A brief list of the enlightenment’s legacies bears Foucault out. This legacy includes:

• the separation of powers
• liberalism
• natural rights
• feminism
• freedom of the press
• the secularisation of education
• opposition to trial without charge
• opposition to torture
• opposition to capital punishment
• freedom of religion, conscience, and toleration

How on earth, it might be asked, could people who are not of the most extreme reactionary convictions want to call these things into disrepute, or the ideas and thinkers who made them possible? If we take stock of the reasons behind today’s hostility to the Enlightenment in political science—and in large areas of philosophy, literary theory and cultural studies—it is perhaps possible to distil five types of criticism that are levelled against “the Enlightenment”.

This “Enlightenment”, we are informed, was characterised by:

• A naïve belief in universal truths and morals closed to difference, complexity, plurality;

• Overconfidence in reason over tradition, religion, sensibility;

• A deeply oppressive project of utopian societal control concealed behind rhetorical appeals to freedom and tolerance;

• An atomizing individualism which isolates individuals and divides communities;

• A Eurocentric hostility to the Other (non-European, non-Judaeo-Christian, non-enlightened …)

Obviously, the attempt to discuss all of these charges is beyond the scope of what I can do tonight. My largest claim tonight will nevertheless be that the widespread currency, almost ça va sans dire, of these understandings of the Enlightenment represents, demonstrably, one of the more remarkable exercises in misrecognition that you might imagine. Put simply: the representations of the /enlightenment on which these criticisms trade bear very little, and in some cases, almost no relation to the key texts and central figures of the period.

To be clear—and so you know I am not out on my own here—they also bear next to no relation to the exacting and longstanding traditions of scholarship on this vital period in the history of ideas, 18th century studies, Enlightenment studies, and cognate disciplines. Voltaire is said to once have commented that if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent Him. Of these criticisms of “the Enlightenment”, it can be said that, even though they have little or no understanding of Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Montesquieu, and the others, they have found it necessary to invent one. We can return in our discussion as to what different causes might have motivated this situation, one of the remarkable signs of the times.

Of course, there are many competing understandings of what the Enlightenment was - I mean now amongst people who do read and engage with its key texts, episodes, characters, and debates. Broadly speaking, however, it can safely be said that there was not one “Enlightenment Project”, except in polemical retrospect. And it is simply a gross misrepresentation to claim that the French Enlightenment’s central proponents (led by Voltaire, the “patriarch” of the philosophes and Diderot, known by contemporaries as “the” philosophe) were naïve, overconfident, utopian or Eurocentric.

Nor were they “Rationalists” in any strict sense. This is why Peter Gay in a classic study called the Enlightenment a “critique of rationalism” as much as “an age of Reason”. What was at stake in the Enlightenment was the contested emergence of a philosophical, critical, systematic and humane spirit of inquiry, as against the kinds of systems-building characteristic of the great Rationalist philosophers of the previous century: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) and before them the scholastic theologians.

But with this much said, what follows will involve two parts: first, I will reconstruct the historical and intellectual preconditions of the Enlightenment and, second, examine three of the key texts of said Enlightenment: Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Diderot’s Letters on the Blind, and Voltaire’s classic Candide. You will appreciate that everything I say has the inevitable scholarly reserve clause: of being limited by the constraints of time, place, audience, and goal. I think and hope nevertheless that many things worth venturing can be ventured and contested.

Part 1: the Enlightenment and the decentring of European culture

First of all, then, just what were the political, social, educational and wider conditions into which the philosophes Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and the others were born? You will recall that in 1720, a date widely recognised as the start of the French Enlightenment, Europe was led almost exclusively by absolute monarchs. These monarchs had been at relative peace since 1648. The Netherlands alone had been a Republic since 1581. Britain had had the “glorious” peaceful revolution of 1689, and become a constitutional monarchy, with some protection of civil liberties. Contrary to some images of the Enlighteners as to a man firebrand republicans, Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire would all soon express very high admiration for the British’s limited institutions.

Elementary education was at this time universal only in Wurttemberg, the Dutch republic, the Duchy of Weimar, Scotland (from 1696), and France (from 1698). In Britain, church-based “charity schools” for lower class boys and girls had been implemented (there were 28,000 by around 1750). In France in every town, the elementary school was managed by teachers chosen by local bishops or curates: education was the province of the Church. Secondary schools were run by Jesuits, with nunneries providing secondary education for some girls. In Britain, “public schools” were for upper-class Anglican boys only. Otherwise, private tutors taught the privileged and wealthy across Europe, who as a result were educated in the classical and biblical heritages and languages, notably Latin. Except in the Dutch republic, universities were in decline. Exactly none of the great philosophers or scientists of the 17th century, nor any of the philosophes, were university men.

Public health was in an even worse situation, by our lights, than education. In England in the 18th century, 59% of children died before age 5, 64% before reaching 10 (especially of whooping cough). Abandonment of infants was widely practiced. Venereal disease was widespread, prostitution rife especially in national capitals. Voltaire estimated that in his lifetime there was about a 20% French mortality through smallpox. Plague was still more than a medieval memory, with epidemics in London (1665), Vienna (1679), Prague (1681), Prussia (1709), Ukraine (1737) and Moscow (1789) between 1650 and 1800. Scarlet fever, malaria, dysentery, pneumonia, diphtheria, and yellow fever from the Americas were all common. Private bathrooms were for only a privileged few: rudimentary open sewers everywhere. Voltaire, again, estimated average Gallic longevity in his age at 27 years.

As for crime and punishment, England after 1689 has enshrined habeus corpus and trial by jury. But there was a gallows in every district of London. Most crimes in England attracted a capital sentence: in 1689, there were 50 capital offences, by 1820, there was 160 (including, of course, homosexuality,as elsewhere). Prisons everywhere were hotbeds of disease, an ersatz capital sentence in many cases. In France, the Crown had the capacity through “lettres de cachet” (secret letters) to imprison anyone without public trial (which happened to Voltaire, before he was exiled), and to make What Laws His Majesty Wishes. Prisoners were everywhere chained up (before as after trial), but in France without habeus corpus and (if the crime was deemed serious) no access to a lawyer. French judges could use torture to elicit confessions when evidence proved insufficient. Capital punishment, including by drawing and quartering, survived for a wide variety of offences, including sorcery and blasphemy.

Everywhere, to varying extents, publications were censored. Generally, Protestant countries were more lenient (think by contrast of the fates of Bruno and Galileo in Italy). Britain was amongst the more lenient, republican Holland the most. In France, all books had to get past the “Great Seal” of the monarch or regent; after the 1757 regicide attempt by Damiens made famous by Foucault’s colourful opening to Discipline and Punish, censorship was tightened. For buying or selling Voltaire, you could in the years before the French revolution be flogged and get up to eight years in the gallows.

1648 and the Westphalia Treaty (ending a 30-year strife within the “Holy Roman Empire”) had granted national monarchs the right to determine the religion of their respective states (cuius regio, eius religio - whosever’s realm, his religion). 1689’s British Act of Toleration had extended toleration there to Protestants although not Catholics, and not complete. In France after 1650, by contrast, Louis XIV came under increasing Catholic pressures to revoke the tolerant Edict of Nantes; pressures to which the Sun King ceded in 1685, unleashing what Michelet called the “holy terror”. After this 1685 “revocation”, as the leading Enlighteners cut their teeth in the Jesuit schools, some 400,000 Huguenots were exiled amidst forced confessions, large-scale expropriations and the closure of Huguenot Churches and businesses.

It is against this background that, to be fair to all concerned, we should weigh the sins, merits and achievements of the lumières. This was a world in which it was pointedly appropriate that Voltaire should open his 1634 Philosophical Letters—on some reckonings the opening salvo of the Enlightenment—by advertising the humanity of British invention of inoculation.

So set against this background, what intellectually did the Enlighteners respond to, and seek to cast their new lights upon in the “century of light”? Scholars divide on how to divide and enumerate the intellectual origins of the Enlightenment. (Ira Wade for instance variously posits three forces, three events, and five intellectual movements, to give you some idea ). It can however safely be said that there are at least four cultural events of such momentous significance that any adequate account of the enlightenment must include them, if we are to understand what animated and occupied the philosophes.

Firstly: the previous century had seen the most remarkable developments in “natural philosophy” (let’s say here, the sciences) since the Alexandrine period. A European who fell asleep in 1600 to wake up around 1720 would have been profoundly shocked by the claims concerning nature that the “century of genius”—of Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Huygens, Harvey, Hayley, Newton and others—had established while he slumbered. This educated man of 1600 would have been convinced, based on the best authorities, that:

• The cosmos was finite and spherical, and the earth was at its centre;

• Heavenly bodies are perfect, moving in perfect spheres, in a ‘fifth element’ of aether—utterly different to our physical world ‘here below’;

• Comets were divine signs;

• The earth was around 6000 years old, per the Bible;

• Mathematics could be applied only to heavenly bodies: the materiality of this vale of tears rendering it opaque to exact counting and measuring;

• And that nature, geologically and biologically, has no history: all species were created at the Genesis.

As he rubbed the sleep from dazzled eyes in 1720, the same man would be asked by his new contemporaries to accept, in almost point for point contrast, that:

• The universe is very large, perhaps infinite;

• The solar system is heliocentric, the earth a satellite of the sun;

• The moon is imperfect, containing craters, evidence of impacts (and other heavenly bodies have their own moons …);

• The same physical laws (notably, Newton’s gravity) apply above and below, so Kepler was right to talk of “celestial mechanics”;

• The planets move in ellipses, not circles;

• Comets move in parabolas, so many signs of nothing but the mathematical marvel of the world-system;

• Movement and acceleration here below is also mathematizable, as indeed, the language of nature everywhere seems to be maths.

As he looked to find his bearings in this new, 18th century into which he had awoken, the pace of “scientific” discoveries would hardly slow. In mathematics trigonometry, calculus, and the theory of probability would soon emerge; in physics, the discoveries of latent heat; Fahrenheit and centigrade measures; the wave theory of light; mechanics reduced to calculus; in astronomy, the parallax of the stars (based on Copernican–Newtonian hypothesis); proven variations in the earth’s axis of rotation; and the charting of the tides with reference to the phases of the moon. In our friend’s new lifetime, presuming he lived to roughly 1780, Benjamin Franklin would “steal heaven from the heavens” with lightning rods, as well as “sceptres from tyrants”. Geology and the earth sciences would be born, soon reporting back that the earth appeared to be tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of years old, contra Genesis; and the new biological sciences would meanwhile begin to undermine the Biblical contention that all species were co-created “in the beginning”.

 

All these discoveries which we so take for granted were profoundly destabilising for the educated Christian, European mindset. They amount, cumulatively, to as great an upset in worldview as anything that had occurred in Europe since Christianity conquered Rome. In the historians’ Ariel and Will Durant’s assessment:

… the effects of science on religion—or rather upon Christianity—seemed to be lethal. Doubtless men would continue to form or favour conceptions of the world that would give hope and consolation, meaning and dignity, to harassed, fleeting lives; but how could the Christian epos of creation, original sin, and divine redemption stand up in a perspective that reduced the earth to a speck among a million stars? What was man that the God of such a universe should be mindful of him? How could the poetry of Genesis survive the explorations of geology? … how could the miracles of Christ, not to mention those widely ascribed to the saints and Satan, be reconciled with the apparent reign of universal law? How could the soul or mind of man be immortal when it seemed so dependent on the nerves and other tissues visibly doomed to decay? What must happen when the religion is so challenged by a science daily growing in scope, achievements, and prestige? And what must happen to a civilisation based upon a moral code based upon that religion?

These are the questions, all of them without ready or agreed-upon answers, of the Enlighteners.

Secondly, at the same time as the natural sciences were declaring their independence from theological supervision, the Catholic order was wrestling with the unfolding effects of Luther’s Reformation, almost exactly 200 years old by 1720. The comforting faith that final authority concerning who and what to believe resided in the Pope or, failing him, in the Councils, was in shreds. “I put no trust in the unsupported authority of Pope or of councils”, said Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521. But what could take their place? Luther had opened a Pandora’s box. His own “[s]cripture or … proven revelation” (sola scriptura, sola fides) was soon contested by Calvin’s “illumination by holy spirit”.

Servetus tried to raise up the Bible against theology: noting that Christ in the New Testament never teaches the Trinity, before being burnt alive by the Calvinists in 1553. For many like Erasmus, Pico, Michel de Montaigne, and Pierre Bayle, reason should be limited so room for faith could be maintained. For Castellio and others, on the contrary, since scripture justifies contradictory stances, Europe should recur to “reason and judgment” to settle religious disputes. By the end of the 17th century, the British Deists (men like Tindall, Blount and Collins) had begun openly questioning Christ’s divinity and the divine provenance of scripture, asking Europeans to embrace a “natural religion” of God and virtue based in reason alone, shorn of myth and ritual: “there is no other way to discover the truth” (Collins).

To add to this cacophony of disputing visions—our third monumental cultural change—into the post-reformation discord of the 16th and 17th centuries came new editions of the rediscovered pagan classics: “gentle prisoners” recovered by humanists from monastic libraries and vaults. For the first time in over one thousand years, educated men and women in the newly-religiously divided Europe could now read a much greater selection of the classics of Greek and Roman Epicureanism, Stoicism, and perhaps above all, the sceptical texts of Sextus Empiricus.

Scepticism is an ability (dynamis) which opposes appearances to judgements in any way whatsoever, with the result that, owing to the equivocality (isosthenia) of the objects and reasons thus opposed, we are brought firstly to a state of mental suspense (epochē) and next to a state of ataraxia [inner peace] …

Sextus Empiricus claimed, looking back to the Greek philosopher Pyrrho who had accompanied Alexander East to India. Different animals have different senses, and evidently perceive the world differently than us, these sceptical texts asked Europeans to consider. Different individual human beings likewise perceive the ‘same’ things differently. What each one of us perceives, even of the same things, varies over time.

More than this, as Pyrrho the traveller had been able to see, peoples from different cultures are each brought up with different fundamental beliefs. In almost any matter you can think of, finally and above all, even the most learned disagree. Certainly, they disagree in claims about Gods and the afterlife, as Montaigne’s “Apology of Raymond Sebond” demonstrated nearly ad infinitem. But since it is the wise, if anyone, whom we should trust, one thing alone becomes clear. This is that Europe should learn a new intellectual humility—ceasing to claim to know what evidently human beings do not, like Socrates, and turning its attention away from divisive claims about things in the heavens to the decidable issues here below.

 

Science, in its empiricist, experimental and Baconian form—the forms of inquiry that had enabled the extraordinary transformation in modern men and women’s sense of the natural world after 1600, our first momentous change—owes a great deal to this recovery of ancient scepticism, mediated by men like Montaigne. For the moderns, as against the scholastics and the Rationalists, we must build knowledge tentatively and from experience upwards, always subject to testing, revision, and falsification. The theological supposition that we can know the Highest Things, too often coupled with the claim that nothing else can truly count as “knowledge” (when it doesn’t count as heresy) must be laid aside. It has no place in the new philosophy.

So, we come now to the fourth intersecting force shaping the Enlightenment (to recall, we have now recalled (1) the scientific revolutions, (2) the reformation and its consequences, and (3) the recovery of the pagan classics). For the sceptics’ observations concerning the individual and cultural relativities of perception and belief resonated with Europe’s educated elites almost as powerfully as their counsel of humility in matters theological did in countries like France, prey after 1530 to bloody sectarian violence.

Between the late 1500s and the high Enlightenment, Ira Wade has in fact documented, no less than 550 travel books were published in Europe, on the back of the discovery of the New World and the Jesuits’ missions to the far East. The libraries of Locke, Montesquieu and Voltaire, we know, were filled with these volumes: of today-mostly-forgotten texts like Montaigne’s Of Cannibals, concerning the American Indians or Of Coaches, concerning the civilizations of Mesoamerica; or again, best-selling texts like the two 1703 volumes of Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, describing his time living with Amerindians, their customs and ways of life.

The disorienting, relativising effects of these books on European consciousness can hardly be overstated. Their strange news from new worlds was nearly as profoundly decentring culturally as the heliocentric hypothesis had been in natural philosophy. How, after all, could Europeans continue to suppose theirs the only high civilization once travelers had gone to “new worlds”, and begun to report about entire civilizations, hitherto unknown, and seemingly untroubled by the sectarian strife that rived Europe? How could Europe any longer suppose the Christian revelation definitive when so many men and women, from these hitherto-unimagined civilizations, clearly knew nothing of the Lord’s salvific Word?

How, again, could Christians suppose that their faith alone was the providential bearer of the high arts of civilization when Jesuit reports from China confirmed, for all who would read them, that here was a culture much older than Christendom or Rome or even Greece, unknown to the God of Abraham, possessed of a noble ethics devoid of contentious claims to supernatural revelation, and with well-kept records going back far beyond the time when the Bible suggested the entire cosmos came into being?

To get near to understanding the Enlightenment, despite the windmills generations of students have now been taught to tilt at, we need first of all to get clear in our minds this picture of a Europe by 1700 that was decentred enough to make the most radical theorist beam. As we have now seen, the Europe into which Messrs Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert and Rousseau were born was a Europe:

(1) wrestling with a nearly wholly transformed sense of the natural world, its dimensions, mechanisms and parameters;

(2) working through sectarian splits and religious conflicts, without any longer an agreed highest court of theological or canonical appeal; bewildered and fascinated

(3) by a profusion of almost unbelievable tales from entire new geographical and cultural worlds, and the undreamt-of comparisons and contrasts these tales suggested; all set against

(4) the background of a revived and expanded access to the riches of classical Greece and Rome, notably including the sceptics’ powerful arguments for the limitations of human knowledge.

This Europe of circa 1720, long before “the postmodern condition”, was then a Europe acutely aware that its own ways of seeing, being and living were not unique—let alone in all regards simply superior or more simply “civilized’ than all others’. To suggest that any intellectual movement that could emerge to prominence from such a background could be naïve, utopian, Eurocentric, and Rationalistic is itself as naïve as it is distant from familiarity with the 18th century texts. It is to three of these texts and their authors that we need accordingly to turn now.

 

Part 2: On the road; Persian Letters, Letters from the Blind, and Candide

The most cursory familiarity with the great philosophes of the French enlightenment, and the works they wrote, ought to be enough to suggest real problems for the postmodernist parody of them as System-building utopian rationalists, firmly convinced of the untroubled superiority of their Europe, with eyes closed or looking down upon the wider world. For a start, of the four paradigmatic figures of the period—Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau—only the latter two wrote anything like a systematic treatise on political philosophy. And only Rousseau—in many ways already the first romantic anti-philosophe—wrote anything like a utopia, his Social Contract. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws is a systematic treatment of political philosophy. But it preaches moderation and practices a heightened attention to the manifold factors that shape political regimes and nations, up to and including the differential effects of climate on peoples’ characters.

Diderot, “the Philosophe,” proclaimed that he was not even an author, two hundred years prior to Roland Barthes. One thing this enigmatic comment reflects is the fact that Diderot never wrote systematic tomes or treatises. He wrote responses, commentaries, prefaces, encyclopedia entries, “supplements”, and—in the case of Raynal’s History of the Two Indies—anonymous interpolations into somebody else’s book. What can be called his “books” were staged letters, dialogues, and even a fictive “dream of D’Alembert”— excluding his novels, dramas, and episodic interventions. For a supposed proto-Comtean social engineer, you can again see, Diderot makes a good poet and provocateur.

Voltaire’s extraordinary output is scarcely less diverse than Diderot’s. It is also foreign to anything like what you might expect from the press the French enlightenment has regularly got from many of its opponents since shortly after July 1789. Francois Arouet as was began his career as a poet, always remained a dramatist; turned after 1730 to proselytising a Lockean form of Newtonianism; invented after 1740 the genre of the philosophical conte from out of oriental travel stories and the philosophy of the times; and then after around 1750 wrote, alongside contes and pamphlets, “philosophical dictionaries” of dispersed thoughts organised by nothing more systematically rational than the letters of the French alphabet. Far from claiming knowledge ascendant, a 1760s Voltaire text advertises its author as an Ignorant Philosopher. Of the five great questions around which Voltaire’s thought turned—God, the soul, good and evil, free will, and the nature of matter–the only one Voltaire claimed knowledge about was la morale. He would throughout his life proffer variations on the claim that all a person needs to know is how to adore god, be just, and love their country.

With this much said at a general level, however, let us turn to three specific, definitive enlightenment texts, and proffer a few observations.

The first of these texts is The Persian Letters of Montesquieu. Published in 1721, it has a real claim to being the first light in this age of lumières. The first thing to note here is the premise announced by the title. The book stages an intercultural encounter with the Other. Two educated Persians travel to Paris, and we are made privy to their epistolary correspondence. Montesquieu conceals his authorship, protesting in the Preface that he is only a translator.

Why would Montesquieu proceed on such a premise? Is it to provide the best possible platform to show, comparatively, the indubitable superiority of France, Europe and Christianity, over the moeurs of these Eastern barbarians? Not at all. The first letter announces that Montesquieu’s Persians are enlightened men, or men on the path of enlightenment:

Rica and myself are perhaps the first Persians who have left their native country urged by the thirst for knowledge; who have abandoned the amenities of a tranquil life for the laborious search after wisdom. / Although born in a prosperous realm, we did not believe that its boundaries should limit our knowledge, and that the lore of the East should alone enlighten us.

This is above all a tale about difference, not its suppression. The Persians can barely come to terms with how astonishingly strange creatures we Europeans are. “We tread, indeed, the same earth; but it seems incredible, remembering in the presence of the men of this country those of the country in which you are,” Letter 24 recounts. Not simply strange, but troubled: “I can consequently assure you that no kingdom has existed with as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ,” Rica writes in Letter 27. The Persians, like us all, understand new and different things with reference to what they know. So, the Pope is, amusingly, a “Grand Mufti”, Priests are “dervishes”, and so on. In Persian eyes, indeed, many sacred and hallowed French institutions and practices show up as far from enlightened or superior to those of the mystic East. Anticipating Marx, for Montesquieu’s Persians the King of France, with his control over the printing and value of money, is like a great magician. As for the Pope:

What I have told you of this prince need not astonish you: there is another magician more powerful still, who is master of the king’s mind, as absolutely as the king is master of the minds of his subjects. This magician is called the Pope. Sometimes he makes the king believe that three are no more than one [the Trinity]; that the bread which he eats is not bread; the wine which he drinks not wine [communion, transubstantiation]; and a thousand things of a like nature …

So, what is going on here? On one hand, Montesquieu’s Persians are an artful ruse, enabling him to (unsuccessfully) skirt the French censors, and call into question the irrationalities of contemporary Parisian life. Letter 86, for example, gives a scathing criticism of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the need for religious toleration, behind the guise of Rica’s musing on his homeland:

You know, Mirza, that some ministers of Shah Soliman formed the design of obliging all the Armenians of Persia to quit the kingdom or become Mohammedans, in the belief that our empire will continue polluted, as long as it retains within its bosom these infidels ... The persecution of the Guebres [Huguenots] by our zealous Mohammedans [Catholics], has obliged them to fly in crowds into the Indies [Holland], and has deprived Persia of that nation which laboured so heartily, that it alone, by its toil, was in a fair way to overcome the sterility of our land ... If unbiased discussion were possible, I am not sure, Mirza, that it would not be a good thing for a state [France] to have several religions.

On the other hand, in and behind this ruse, Montesquieu is up to something else. The Persian Letters are a subtle exercise in estranging the familiar, adopting the perspective of an other in order to look at what is usually taken for granted—as if it were now exotic. The texts is, if you like, an engine for engaging readers to imagine what “we” do as curious and unusual, less intrinsically superior to what the “Others” we set ourselves off against do than sharing in its humanity and idiosyncrasy. If a European went to Rica’s homeland in Montesquieu’s book, he would describe the Muftis as bishops or prelates. What is at stake, in Genevieve Lloyd’s words, is “a cosmopolitan ideal nourished by what can be seen as an expansive form of scepticism”. This sentence about The Persian Letters might stand as a description of many of the key documents in the enlightenment.

We turn then to our second text: Diderot’s 1749 Letter on the Blind, for the Uses of Those Who Can See. Again, the title is revealing. Once more, this is a text which purports to transcribe or publish a letter written by someone else, this time to an educated lady. A game of authorial masks or personae is again in play, with a view (again, unsuccessful) to duping the Parisian censors. Secondly, what “uses” exactly could we, the sighted, possibly hope to gain from studying the blind? Diderot’s text, like Montesquieu’s on the Persians, is a play with and on our expectations: here, our expectations that we, the sighted, are more “enlightened” than the blind and thus can learn nothing from them at all.

The text starts with Diderot’s narrator visiting at the house of a man-born-blind from Puiseaux, whom the nameless narrator “***” goes to suspicious lengths to assure us is not wholly fictional. Far from being helpless, the man is depicted as intelligent, tidy, skilled at needlework and the lathe. Amongst other things, we learn that he is much less afraid of blind civil authorities than most of we sighted—which is quite something. He is certainly much more audially and haptically sensitive than most of us can ever hope to be; and something of a lover, a trickster, and a wit. The narrator and his companions begin their visit by asking him condescendingly for his opinions about optical devices, like the mirror, that they know he can have no direct experience of. By the end of the exchange, the man-born-blind is mocking them for the vanity of their ideas concerning the unsighted and the dullness of their empathetic imaginations. “I perceive, gentleman,” said he, “that you are not blind: for you are astonished at what I do, [yet] why are you then not as much astonished at my capacity even to speak?”

Since they lack sight, Diderot’s narrator contends, the blind have indeed a need and thus a heightened ability to think in abstractions, as Saunderson so vividly shows. But Diderot takes the opportunity to turn this observation into a pointed attack on the Cartesian Rationalists—who think that our mind is born pre-equipped with Innate Ideas without need to experiment and to learn by experience. It is not a Saunderson who is blind, in the most important senses, Diderot suggests. It is these Rationalists who close their eyes to the basis both of learning and the development of moral sensibility in our experience, beginning in earliest childhood when we are all like men-born-blind suddenly awakened to light.

The animating problem inspiring the Letter is then the so-called Molyneux problem. Would a man born blind, like Diderot’s hero, but who has been given abstract descriptions of visible objects by others be able to correctly identify the described objects if their eyesight was restored? This experiment, Diderot and others saw, is a kind of test-case for the Cartesian, Rationalist hypothesis. If Descartes is right, the man-born-blind should instantly be able to “see” and identify shapes, or at least geometrical forms, when his eyesight is restored. The reality which was in Diderot’s time able to be tested in certain celebrated cases, is quite different. The reality favours Lockean empiricism: the idea that the basis of our knowledge is through experience, trial, error, and education—not Reason alone.

So, there is much that we sighted can learn about ourselves from looking at and conversing with the blind, Diderot’s Letter on the Blind artfully attests. If the blind can use words correctly, to describe objects they have never seen, it is because they learn to apply the right words on the right occasion based on hearsay: the trusted testimony of other people. Yes, Diderot suggests. But then how much of what we sighted people claim to know—with as many limitations, perhaps, as we can appreciate in the blind—is actually based on hearsay from trusted authorities, whether civic, educational or clerical? Diderot’s Letter on the Blind, in fact, plays throughout its pages on the opposition of light and dark at the titular heart of “the enlightenment”. “If a man who had sight only for a day or two found himself in the midst of a blind people, he would have to either hold his peace or be considered a brain-sick fool”, his narrator at one point opines. Then the text continues in a way which shows what really is at stake here, and which world of “blind faith” the philosophe wants to open the eyes of:

Be pleased to dwell only a little upon this supposition; it will remind you of the persecutions undergone by those poor wretches who discovered truth in the dark ages and were rash enough to reveal it to their blind contemporaries, and found their bitterest enemies were those who from their circumstances and education would have seemed most likely to receive it willingly.

Diderot was, in fact, imprisoned in Vincennes for penning this “Letter”. The episode which seems most to have attracted the censor’s anger is the famous death scene that Diderot imagines for Saunderson. The blind, who cannot see the beauties of nature, but can understand enough to sense their deprivation, are much less likely to believe in the Christian idea that everything happens for a just reason, Diderot impiously suggests. “Look at me, Mr Holmes,” his dying Saunderson implores his beloved helper: “I have no eyes. What have we done, you and I, to God, that one of us has this organ while the other has not?” This problem of evil and of the undeserved suffering of innocents is also at the beating heart of the third and last text I want to look at now. This is Voltaire’s Candide.

 

The great enlightenment scholar Ira Wade has commented that, so central was Voltaire to the consciousness of those both involved and opposed to the French enlightenment, that any adequate response to the period must place an understanding of the “patriarch of the philosophes” at its centre. “To name Voltaire is to characterize the entire eighteenth century,” Victor Hugo said. Will Durant’s aphorism is better: “Italy had its renaissance, Germany its reformation: France had Voltaire.” Of all of Voltaire’s works, meanwhile, the 1759 novella Candide would have to be the justly most renowned. Candide stands at the heart of Voltaire’s incredibly prolific endeavours. So, to look at Candide, perhaps more than any other enlightenment text, is to approach what was central to this extraordinary moment in European intellectual life.

What is its theme? The subtitle this time gives us a clue: Candide, Of Optimism. Here then is a pivotal test case for the idea that the lumières were utopians, daftly convinced of the inevitable, unstoppable progress of reason, toleration and humanity. And here again, the postmodern, reactionary expectation misses the mark almost comically. The material cause for Voltaire’s 1759 novel is one of the events the characters experience within it: the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that struck the pious city, its Churches crammed with worshippers on All-Saints’ day, followed by a devastating Tsunami. What could the Church make of this disaster, and the deaths of 30,000 people without apparent merit or desert? Could it be a deserving punishment for the sins of the Lisbonites? The earthquake had killed Catholic and Protestant alike, women and children. It had even spared some Muslim infidels. Where was the justice in that?

But Voltaire’s primary target in this text was not the Catholic Church and its theologians. It was, like Diderot in the Letter on the Blind, philosophical Rationalism: although not this time Descartes, but the German philosopher Leibniz. In a book entitled Theodicy, on the justice of God, the philosopher had elected to prove that this world we live in, for all its apparent light and shade, is the best of all possible worlds. Reason, endowed with natural light, can grasp a priori that God must be infinitely Good, Powerful, and All-Knowing. Otherwise He would not be God. Such a Being, all- powerful, could create an infinity of possible worlds. But such a Being, all-Good, could only create the best of all possible worlds. And so here we, enfranchised philosophically now with the belief that Tout est bien, despite all the cries of innocents, infant mortality, plagues, insanity, influenza, and all the other ills that beset the mortal condition. One need not even leave one’s armchair to think out this philosopher’s balm.

Voltaire’s spoof of Leibniz is embodied in the character of Pangloss, the philosophical tutor of our hero, Candide. Pangloss is a Professor of “métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie", bitter at having been overlooked by leading German academies. He is devoutly convinced that Tout est Bien in this best of all possible cosmic denouements:

"It is demonstrable," said he, "that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end. Observe, that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles—thus we have spectacles. Legs are visibly designed for stockings—and we have stockings. Stones were made to be hewn, and to construct castles— therefore my lord has a magnificent castle… Pigs were made to be eaten— therefore we eat pork all the year round. Consequently, they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing, they should have said: all is for the best."

It is a teaching which the young Candide can well agree upon when he gazes upon lovely maiden, Cunegonde, daughter of the presiding Baron of his homeland in Westphalia. He indeed finds himself at these times filled with an irresistible longing to be her “sufficient reason”—another Leibnizian term—and for her, very much, to be his. It is this longing that attracts the Baron’s rage and leads to the expulsion of our secular, little Adam from his Edenic garden. He is now set loose into a postlapsarian world wherein at every turn he, Pangloss, Cunegonde and their companions encounter rapine, butchery, idiocy, mendacity, cruelty and misery of every conceivable shape and kind.

Candide goes first into the army and war in Holland. Escaping death amidst the carnage, he and Pangloss (an insatiable philanderer who has by now contracted syphilis) arrive in Lisbon just in time for the 1755 earthquake and tsunami. In the aftermath, Pangloss is about to be incinerated in one of the auto-da-fes that took place, burning heretics to appease the wrath of God. Candide rescues both his teacher and Cunegonde, who has meanwhile fallen into the hands of a lustful Grand Inquisitor, and so the lovers make their way to Buenos Aires by ship. There the beautiful Cunegonde is again stolen from her paramour, this time by the Governor, and Candide is again expelled. For a brief, happy time he happens upon Eldorado, the fabled land of gold which Voltaire in addition peoples with enlightened Deists, without priests or sects. Aided by these benevolent souls, Candide soon however leaves the enlightened paradise laden with golden sheep, aiming to buy back Cunegonde from her captors. Of course, wherever he then goes, people befriend, deceive and fleece him.

After losing nearly everything, and not finding Cunegonde, he returns to sleazy, gilded Paris. Here, much to his joy, he finds Pangloss, riddled by syphilis and now made a galley slave for his ongoing “experiments in natural philosophy”, this time with a Moslem girl. The pair finally make their way East to Turkey, where news tells that Cunegonde has been enslaved. Candide finds her, much diminished in beauty and nearly broken by her trials. But he buys her back, deciding firmly that the best thing possible in this possible world is to withdraw from the universal wreck into a private existence. There, in a small house and garden from which he can still see people being led off into slavery:

Pangloss sometimes [still] said to Candide: "There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts." "All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."

For a philosopher supposedly heading up a clique of wide-eyed social engineers, firmly convinced that the course of human history is leading inevitably to the best possible world, Candide looks like a pretty astonishing lapse. It looks indeed, as several of Voltaire’s contemporaries charged, much more like a profoundly pessimistic text, if not the product of despair. For a text supposedly expounding unregenerate Eurocentrism, the text is again riddled with unconscionable oversights. The tipping point for Candide, in terms of his final repudiation of Panglossian optimism, after all comes when he happens upon a cruelly oppressed negro slave to Dutch mercantilism:

"Was it Mynheer Vanderdendur," said Candide, "that treated you thus?"

"Yes, sir," said the negro, "it is the custom. They give us a pair of linen drawers for our whole garment twice a year. When we work at the sugar-canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg; both have happened to me. This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe …”

"Oh, Pangloss!" cried Candide, "you had not guessed at this abomination; it is the end. I must at last renounce your optimism."

"What is this optimism?" asked Cacambo.

"Alas!" said Candide, "it is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong."

We see then that as Diderot’s Letter on the Blind Contests Rationalism’s beliefs concerning how we learn, Candide is also exactly what Peter Gay’s description of the enlightenment claims: a critique of excessive Rationalism. It is the testing of the claims of Systematic Philosophy and Theology, which claims to explain everything, against the manifold exceptions and anomalies of human experience—duly magnified for artistic effect (although, sadly, all the horrors relayed in Candide’s travels have historical referents). The yawning abyss between human beings’ fond philosophical constructions and what experience proffers us is what fuels the extraordinary black humour of the novel. It is Voltaire’s genius to have somehow made of the most appalling litany of disasters and human suffering imaginable one of the most hilarious performances in all literature or philosophy. One chapter heading thus reads: “Candide and Martin, reasoning, drew near the Coast of France”. In the Bay of Lisbon, as a storm whips up, Candide prepares to jump into the water to save his benefactor, the good Anabaptist Jacques. But everything is for the best:

 

Candide drew near and saw his benefactor, who rose above the water one moment and was then swallowed up for ever. He was just going to jump after him, but [just then] was prevented by the philosopher Pangloss, who demonstrated to him that the Bay of Lisbon had been made on purpose for the Anabaptist to be drowned …

Any “rationalism” that turns our faces away from human suffering, Candide cries out, is not worth the august name. It is a species of madness or unreason. All reason worthy of the name should minister to human needs, relations and affections: what Voltaire called la morale. To the extent that any philosophers’ or theologians’ dreams rationalise the diminution of human beings and the destruction of their lives and communities, it deserves the indignation that fired Voltaire’s satirical pen. Behind the humour, Candide is one long cry of outrage, as Victor Hugo commented. It is also the most devastating reductio ad absurdum of the idea so many of its enemies continue to impute to the enlightenment: that some all-uniting Reason does or could govern the world or the course of human affairs, unchallenged by chance, caprice, and human folly.

Conclusion

I have spoken too long, so I will now briefly conclude. What does an understanding of the shaping historical and intellectual preconditions of the enlightenment, together with the three key texts we have now examined, suggest about the kind of “age of reason” the enlightenment involved?

In Montesquieu’s and Diderot’s Letters, we see the force of what Immanuel Kant approached when he claimed that one precondition of sensus communis between human beings is the cultivation in people of the ability to see oneself through the eyes of others. Far from opposing “difference”, these two key Epistles of the enlightenment stage encounters between European and non-European, sighted and blind, enlightenment and ignorance. They are artful exercises in confronting and working through the loss of Europe’s providential sense of its own uniqueness and cosmic centrality, central to the Christian epos: prompting their readers to relook at their beliefs, customs and society critically, comparatively and ironically.

They are also works far more sceptical than Rationalist, a feature central also to Voltaire’s Candide, the last of our three texts tonight. Far from being an a priori deduction or bloodless tome, Candide above all pits human prejudices against the manifold complexities and difficulties of human experience, as the scientific culture that had developed since Bacon had done in the natural world, with such stunning cumulative effects. Like the Molyneux experiment which prompts Diderot’s Letter on the Blind, these enlightenment texts seek out and stage confirmations and falsifications of our beliefs, against what shared experience can attest. They ask us to suspend less disbelief than belief—long enough to put our ideas to the test, and to weigh the matters we are considering from more than one perspective, eyes open to possible counter-considerations.

Anything but doctrinaire or absolutist, the lumières to a man—even the most radical—preached religious pluralism and toleration. Their opponent was always less religion itself than what Voltaire called “fanaticism”: the conviction that since We (allegedly) Know the Decisive Truth, all who disagree with us can be coerced into agreement or else denigrated, exiled or killed. We ought, if not always to love our neighbour, to learn to live with him, no matter at which Altars he prays. To finish with the famous entry “Philosophe” in Diderot and D’Alembert’s 1751 Encyclopedia:

… our philosopher, who knows how to divide his time between retreat and the commerce of men, is full of humanity. He is Terence's Chremes, who feels that he is a man, and whose humanity alone makes him interested in the fortunes of his neighbor, good or bad. Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto.