RSS

Contact us

Friday 9 January 2009

Please can we have our Enlightenment back?

Hywel Williams says the faddish atheism of Hitchens and Dawkins is a subplot of the war on terror that misrepresents the true spiritual context of the 18th-century Enlightenment

But it’s in the relationship between science and philosophy that the latter-day stereotypes about the Enlightenment really collapse. Far from being allies — with brave philosophy egging on scientific progress — they were in fact enemies. Aristotelianism — a hangover from mediaeval scholasticism — was still dominant in 17th-century philosophy and rightly seen as a dead hand by experimental scientists. Moreover there is hardly a single scientist of the Age of Enlightenment who was not a professing Christian of some kind. Baron d’Holbach’s thoroughgoing materialism was entirely exceptional — which accounts for his notoriety. Newton’s Unitarianism meant that he doubted Christ’s divinity, but that still means he was in a serious tradition of religious thought — and one that had a profound impact on his portrayal of the regular and uniform laws of classical physics. And — most awkwardly for our modern polemicists — what scientists meant then by ‘reason’ could involve much of what we would now call magic. Francis Bacon’s prose seems coolly lucid until we remember his dabbling in the occult, and Newton was keen on alchemy.

David Hume’s sceptical refinement makes him the Folk Enlightenment’s pin-up boy. But it was that same scepticism which made him doubt science’s objectivity: genuine knowledge, he said, was based on sensory evidence, and science was therefore authentic enough. But for Hume that also made science subjective — the product of one person’s experience. It’s also Hume who taught us how weak a thing reason really is — a ‘slave of the passions’, as he puts it — reflecting our interests, ambitions and prejudices. A little less cockiness about reason as their private possession might cure our present-day crusaders of their vulgar certitudes.

Hywel Williams is a contributing editor of The Spectator.

More articles from: Hywel Williams | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comments (1)

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved