HISTORY OF IDEAS

Prof. B. Harvey

Enlightenment Ideas--the Sequence of our Readings Leading up to Romanticism

1. Enlightenment science ("Nature in the Encyclopedia")

--puts nature at a distance so it can be rationally observed & classified (Peale museum painting)

--corollary is that the “self”, rather than deemed corrupted by sin or regenerated by Christ, can be self-engineered, perfected absent of God’s gracious intervention (Franklin)

2. Enlightenment protection of property ("Civil Rights ... Possessive Selfhood")

--erosion of hierarchical Great Chain of Being + development of a science of government leads to egalitarianism and theory of a natural right to equality and security of self and one's body (Locke)

--Locke is the first ideologue for capitalism (trade and the acquisition of property)

3.  Enlightenment thinkers seek, most fundamentally, freedom ("The Advancement of Freedom")

--clearly, Equiano demonstrates this

--radical Enlightenment thinkers (Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft) embrace political egalitarianism (exemplified by the French Revolution, even at the cost of potential anarchy), gender emancipation, and the critique of all dogma

--The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Age is often called, in literary contexts, the Age of Satire: the rise of satiric/skeptical journalism--i.e. satire critiques

--Paine critiques; uses his rationality to puncture superstition and dogma, but not always clear what he replaces dogma/authority with.  Paine was vilified in his latter days because he seemed to be promoting mob-rule, atheistical values (he was a Deist, not an atheist), and so on.  Paine doesn't promote particular ideas: what he promotes is every individual's right to think as she/he wishes, without the constraints of authority.

4. … then an amazing intellectual/cultural shift occurs: the endorsement of individual reason and autonomy against dogma turns into an endorsement of pure interiority, and we enter the Romantic Era.  Blake, famous Romantic poet, loathes social oppression, but what he hates most is what he calls the "mind-forged manacles"!!!  Paradoxically (almost) the drive towards individualism in the 18th-century simultaneously fuels social critique and moves us towards a preoccupation with the interiorities of selfhood, detached from concerns about social oppression.  To be continued….