What of all the others? On recovering the Enlightenment

Contrary reactionary and postmodern images, 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 (in fact) Eurocentric.11 Nor were they “Rationalists” in any strict sense. This is why Peter Gay, in a classic study, characterized the Enlightenment as a “revolt against 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, or spirits, of inquiry (l’esprit philosophique). This was conceived in direct contrast to the kinds of systems-building characteristic of the Great Rationalist philosophers of the previous century (think Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) and before them the scholastic Theologians (l’esprit de système).The chapter has two parts. First, drawing on classic works by Ira Wade, Will and Ariel Durant, and Peter Gay, we will present a reconstruction of the historical and intellectual preconditions of the Enlightenment, reading it forwards from the early modern period, not backwards, in light of later modern history. We specify four key cultural transformations which shaped the texts and debates of the philosophes, including the scientific revolution, the discovery of the new world, and increased concourse with China. (Part 1). Part 2, in this light, examines three of the key texts of the French Enlightenment, assessing them both in light of this intellectual history, and in contrast to the reactionary and postmodernist criticisms of “the Enlightenment project”: Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Diderot’s Letters on the Blind, and Voltaire’s classic Candide (Part 2). Our claims is that these texts evince a cosmopolitanism rooted in forms of epistemic scepticism and deep debts to classical philosophy, not any system-building utopian impulse, closed to otherness, etc.