Voltaire and the Radical Enlightenment

in this lecture we're looking at Voltaire and the radical enlightenment and what we're doing in this lecture is we've looked already at the Scientific Revolution and some of the changes there the paradigm shifts in terms of the science that's involved this was the great lurch forward this is the time when everything seemed to be changing when they were advancements on the rise in every field both in terms of technology and in terms of our awareness of the ways that the physical world works what we're gonna look at in this lecture though is the philosophical side of the radical enlightenment and we've chosen to focus on Voltaire not because he's the only figure not by any means but because Voltaire really is one of the more celebrated figures of the more radical enlightenment of the 18th century and because Voltaire is a very interesting character he's a Frenchman who was exiled for a time in England he later lives for a time in Geneva and the focus of so much of his work is on the new cosmopolitan understanding of the way that all these different cultures throughout Europe as well as around the world we're forcing intellectuals to reconsider the foundations of their thinking so you might say the Volt's here is a microcosm of still much of the radical philosophical enlightenment and we can begin with the context what is going on in the 18th century that is causing so much change part of it is those two economics and part of it is in the intellectual world in terms of socio economics with a rapid expansion of the British in the French as well as other countries around the world what begins to come on the rise is the fact that all these European countries and the leaders of these groups the intellectuals and the writers suddenly become far more aware of the sheer diversity around the world as to the fundamental questions of faith life and morality so in the British Empire or the French Empire or the Dutch set up significant colonies in trade in the Far East or when the Spanish and the porch or in Central and South America or when a lot of these different countries come to North America they come in contact with a number of different natives from all of these different countries around the world then they begin to trickle back all these recounts all these stories as to the differences in culture practice in faith that by and large Europeans were unaware of before you might say that this is one of the first impressions one of the more pregnant moments where you see this new perspective come into the minds of people in Europe that their perspective on things is not the only one their faith their practice all these things they begin to realize might be historically or culturally conditioned and that is to say nothing of the variety now within the West and within the Americas of the different Christian perspectives on things and we're not just talking about Catholic versus Protestant we're talking about the wide variety of a number of different Protestant perspectives on things like faith and practice it might be put this way the things that were different between the various Protestant groups or in general between Protestants and Catholics were the things that you can see on the outward side first and foremost if you would I were to go to a Quaker service and then the following Sunday go to a Presbyterian service then the next Sunday attend a Catholic Mass and then after that attend a Baptist congregational meeting we would be struck by all the differences of perspective and practice not only in our own day but obviously in the context of the 18th century you add to that mix though the variety of different countries and practices around the world people that are not Christian but have either indigenous faith or one of the great faiths of the ancient world whether it's Asian or South American or whatnot so what happens in the Youtube century in terms of the philosophical awareness of the world around them is Europeans doesn't become a bit enamored somewhat paternalistically of course but they become enamored with the variety of expressions around the world if you were to go to London then go to the National Portrait Gallery which is a wonderful museum it takes all the best portraits of all the major figures predominantly of English culture but often of others as well and they're all there in one museum people usually get a chuckle when they go into the 18th century wing of that building and they begin to look at these portraits they start to notice a lot of funny things in the portraits things like turbans strange fashion choices that suddenly seem to come out of nowhere you might say that's an example of what we're talking about this type of engagement in this case with Arabian culture is a new thing in particular in England one of the more important books one of the more successful publications in the 18th century was the book 1001 Arabian Nights now from the Vantage of the 21st century we can realize that a lot of this engagement with Arabic culture or with the wider area of the Middle East or India or these kinds of things certainly is not as complex as it was in those actual countries but the 18th century can be forgiven for not having this sheer amount of information at our fingertips that we have the day if we wanted to say explore the culture of another country in their own day this is revolutionary they are aware of all this variety around the world so that's the again cultural or socio-economic changes that are afoot there's another thing that stinks up with us though in the philosophical arena it were called our first lecture on the Enlightenment that we were talking about the philosophy of Descartes Descartes is either hailed or maligned depending on the perspective of modern philosophers or theologians because of his radical commitment to the idea that assurance or certainty needs to be based on the rational method of whatever my mind can deduce or infer from the world around us Descartes is more of the classical abstract philosopher he's goes deep into the mind not so much into the terms of experience but deep into the mind as he weighs out the question as to what we can know and what we can be certain of so the Cartesian Revolution we said then was this move to believe that is our rationality or our perspective that is the only guarantee of certainty you move forward and you get to the teachings of John Locke who we've mentioned once or twice before and the importance of Locke is that he comes up with an alternative understanding of what philosophers call epistemology which is specifically again this question how can I know what I know what process does my mind go through when it learns things and Locke had a very radical in a very important change to add to the question of epistemology Locke essentially differs with Descartes not in terms of his goal not in terms of what he wants when he's discussing epistemology but in the method that he describes as how we learn what we learn Locke is a radical experienced person you might say for Locke the way the mind works is that it is a blank slate a tabula rasa we said and I described that in the modern world as something like a computer without software when we are born into this world we don't come with precognition or a set of assumptions or presuppositions that allows us to make sense of the world you might say that in this dense Locke is the anti plate inist there's no world of the forms there's no abstract concepts out there somewhere whether in the mind of God or simply on their own that we tap into whenever we engage with the world nope Locke says that the way we come the knowledge of anything is through our experiences so the moral code is learned our understanding of the faith our understanding of culture all these things are purely conditioned by our experiences when that locky and philosophy is vital though it's not embraced by everybody but for those who do embrace it Locke's understanding of the way that we come to knowledge is not simply a theory about how our minds work it's also a theory as to how the world works if the world around us is more relative if all that we are getting from it is experiences from which we might extrapolate general principles well that would seem to make the case that morality itself our culture's our languages everything about us is itself a relative situation or relative proposition and again I think people the 21st century far more intuitively understand this we know that if we grew up in a different country let's say you're American or you're British or you're Russian all who take these three people and move them around and the Russian person is raised in the American context and so on and so forth we all assume that there's going to be different instincts different relative cultural values that each person is going to come away with as a result of their different contexts Locke you might say absolute eise's this process he makes it just simply axiomatic the way we come to knowledge the way we come to the expression of who we are is entirely bound by our experiences now what does all this have to do with the Enlightenment well it is an ancient question it's a almost universal question whatever someone is asking the question about the fundamentals of life as to what is absolute and what is relative now it's a myth that all people prior to the Enlightenment just told everything is absolute they certainly were more inclined towards more diverse ideas being absolute and fewer things being relative but it's always been a question we see change in the world around us we see relativity we see one culture one language what is absolute and what is relative that's a more philosophical question obviously but it really gets at the question of life is my morality is my faith relative is it as something I hold or is there some eternal absolute truth that I am embracing and at the risk of being overly simplistic you might say that the pre enlightenment world kept all the things with the faith and doctrine and ethics and of the rightness and wrongness of the things around them in the category the absolutes this is obviously the case with the faith no one of the Middle Ages believed that faith was relative there was one faith handed down and though we might debate the limits of my ability to describe the faith it was often assumed that differences of expression of the faith was a problem of right and wrong maybe a great area to be sure but that gray area was not seen as a qualifier to the fact that their faith was absolute rather it was an opportunity for maybe the Scholastic's maybe the humanists to get involved with tried clarify what we believe about something versus what we shouldn't believe about it after the Enlightenment after the Cartesian Revolution in the time of Locke and all these cultural changes in particular in the 18th century the main thing that begins to happen in terms of the thought life of Europe and by extension in America is that things like faith and ethics and culture get moved more radically into the relative category they are taken out of the context of being one of the absolutes and they are moved over to the side of relativism now notice I didn't say that only enlightenment people are relativists everyone again throughout the history of frankly human thought has always debated what is timeless and what is temporal or momentary we can do this in all kinds of arenas but the main thing with the radical enlightenment is they're moving the faith doctrine practice and in some sense is ethics over to the category of being relative now there is some ambiguity here in the Enlightenment understanding of virtue and morality and ethics some argued a little more radically that ethics itself our moral code is itself relative just to take one example when Europeans come in contact with other cultures one of the things that begin to notice is that not everyone shares their view of marriage marriage being one man and one woman in certain countries in the Middle East and in other places around the world they hear stories of harems or a polygamy they also hear up stories of people marrying people that are more closely associated with their immediate family cousins marrying and these kinds of things things that were considered to be in a previous era maybe in the Middle Ages so obviously part of the absolute structure of the world that when they would come in contact with this it just simply throws them for a loop and again there was some ambiguity as to the role of ethics some argue that by and large the majority of our ethical assumptions of our ethical codes or culture bound and therefore relative they then however will appeal to something called natural law and they attempt to use reason and logic and all these methods to come up with a set of basic human assumptions that everyone must abide by they'll notice for example that no culture condones murder outright and so they'll try to find things that are timeless in the Code of Ethics others will be a little more conservative on the question and they will try to keep the majority of their you might say Christian European ethics but they'll try to take the faith component out of them and they'll try to argue that all these pieces are based on logic or reason and on the principles of the Enlightenment and there's a great deal of complexity here we don't want to make it overly simple but by large what is happening in the radical enlightenment again is that faith is being moved over to the relative side of this equation for everyone though involved in the Enlightenment in particularly 18th century for all the leading thinkers the great hope was that science and reason would be the things that guarantee an adequate foundation in structure for the world around them they were optimistic in other words that in their categories though they had moved faith over that their principles of reason a process and of logical thinking of the sciences would be the thing that guarantees our foundations ok so if that's the context how does Voltaire fit into this and how does he embody this change well in part he embodies it in his own personal life Voltaire was born in 1694 and he lived until 1778 which is of course right in the context of the American Revolution he was not born with a name Voltaire his birth name is actually Francoise Marie our way more on that in a minute he was born in the city of Paris his family had some means and so he was given a very good education he first of all studied with the Jesuits where he learned Greek and Latin and then his father wanted him to be a lawyer Voltaire wanted nothing to do with this and so he tricked his father at one point and he was living out of the pretenses of being a notary but in the mean time he was actually a poet his father finds out and then does eventually twist his arm to go to law school while he's still a relatively young man he gets involved a love affair with a woman who is Protestant refugee to the area France this in some ways forms the context throughout Voltaire's life of his philosophical commitment to tolerance and religious expression here he is a Catholic man very much part of the French culture and we have to remind ourselves here France has an absolute monarchy the king is supreme still during Voltaire's life it's also overtly Catholic going all the way back to the days of the Hyuga knows and in France of course just like in the sixties and 17th centuries the wedding of Catholic religion with this French absolutist understanding of the King meant that there was a great deal of oppression of both free speech and process whatever the nobility wanted to push something but here Voltaire falls in love has a love affair with a French refugee and that eventually comes to an end when his father finds out and he puts a stop to it it returns to Paris and he gets involved politically with one of the great problems of an absolutist form of government which is that if you hack off a noble person good luck finding any due process or judicial way of vindicating yourself over against those in power Voltaire receives an insult from a French noblewoman and he replied pretty aggressively to her he was eventually beaten for this by some of the men of her entourage he then presses the case at one point offering to have a duel to defend his own honor at which point the King gets involved because of course this is part of a noble house and Voltaire is without process and without a trial imprisoned in the Bastille and historians are not always an agreement on this but it does seem to be the case that this is a pivot for Voltaire he actually takes the name volts here at this point and I won't go into it but there are debates as to what the name might mean there's no real cryptic undertone here it's just their differences of opinion as to what the origin is but he takes the name Voltaire and it becomes you might say a symbol of his now reaction against both political absolutism as well as the religious oppression in his own day eventually volts here makes the case to the crown that not be left to languish in prison but that he would be allowed to be exiled in England the crown actually agrees and so for a number of years Voltaire moves to England and he lives in London so here's the moment Voltaire is quite hacked off quite angry at the abuse of power as well as his noticing of those who are suffering plight for their religious views he now transfers to an entirely different country where he experiences all kinds of things that he thinks are the medicine that France needs to take England of course had a constitutional monarchy it had a balancing of the central government of a king as well as the elected parliament he finds us to be extraordinary there are all types of rights and privileges within the English context that were not afforded to people in the French context so he begins to form some of his ideas politically as to how absolutism ought to be overthrown Voltaire also comes into contact with all a number of different Protestants in fact one of the later works he eventually writes is called the philosophical letters and it dropped like a bomb on French culture because in it he describes not Catholic culture and he doesn't attack it rather he lays out all manner of different Protestant faiths how they are to be commended though at times he does speak negatively of some of these groups Voltaire in particular points out that the Quakers are a persecuted group a suppressed group that should be commended for their steadfastness in their views and that they ought to not be persecuted for this while in London Voltaire also becomes enamored with the Scientific Revolution this is of course the heyday when the name of Isaac Newton is at its apex there's some accounts that say that volter actually attended Newton's funeral while he was there in London we're not quite sure about that but at least speaks to his fascination with the process of the Scientific Revolution he's in it just as a lot of other enlightenment folks did the hope of progress and change and a rational foundation for the life of a European so Voltaire eventually is restored to the French world he's allowed to come back and he comes back you might say as a celebrated voice here's a man who has been treated wrongly and he never ceases to remind people of this fact but he's also had his eyes opened to the problems that are before him he believes in European culture as well as some of the solutions that he wants to suggest so again he comes back to France and he spent a number of years really developing his vocabulary and his engagement with the Enlightenment culture in particular with the sciences he reads Newton almost devotionally it just simply loves the revolution in the scientific world that Newton has given to Europe Voltaire of course is more of a poet and a playwright and at a later date he actually travels to the city of Geneva where he lives for a time and Geneva in this day is still very Calvinistic it's still very much part of the post-reformation world now what's interesting is plays the stage had been outlawed there in Geneva and so some of the works in some of the plays that Voltaire had written could not be staged Voltaire had also around this time come to read the philosophy of Leibniz and we don't have to go into Leibniz in any detail but the simple way to understand Leibniz is he is a determinist he believed that the world is fixed that it has a structure that all things are predetermined it's not the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination rather it's more of a philosophical or a scientific understanding of determinism it was also highly optimistic the idea was that the world was going to be progressing step-by-step through this deterministic cycle to better in better days well reacting against that Voltaire wrote one of his more famous widely read books known as Candide Candide really might say is a lampooning of this deterministic rigid optimistic understanding of the world so in the book he lists all types of stories some made up some true of places where the world should be seen rather more as chaotic rather than a world that is fixed and optimistically progressing to better and better days now he wouldn't say so much the Voltaire's of cynic rather he is the man who was poking the idols of all the philosophies around him he opposes the dogmatism of men like liveness who believe in something of a manifest destiny of the European world significantly later in his life voltar actually becomes involved in one of the things that becomes something of the hallmark for the modern understanding at least the popular level of Voltaire that as the Voltaire becomes the champion of those who are oppressed now Voltaire himself by the end of his life is not a Christian he actually refers to Christianity as vile and one of the great plagues on humanity I think from the context that we've just described you might get a sense as to what has driven him to this he sees religion the Catholic faith in particular as having wet itself to the French monarchy and therefore it becomes a tool of power and oppression well at the end of his life he ends up actually championing the causes of all types of religiously persecuted groups he does though through persuasion he doesn't get involved with politics himself but he constantly lays out what he believes ought to be a society of tolerance and relativism when it comes to manners the faith he also continues to champing the idea that the political organs of the state ought to have checks and balances they should not be absolutist and this town of Voltaire is epitomized in an apocryphal some sort of urban legend as to one of his boats I see this quote all the time on social media but unfortunately Voltaire himself never said it still though the quote is a good one in terms of you might say describing the perspective the Volt's here was coming from and the quote is I disapprove of what you have to say but I defend to the death your right to say it now we now know that that quote actually comes from a early 1900s account of Voltaire it's not anything he himself said but it does somewhat encapsulate what Voltaire stood for Voltaire in other words was not so much trying to outlaw or suppress or getting rid of village and but rather going back to the model we talked about at the beginning this lecture he has moved faith of any variety Catholic or Protestant into the category of something that is relative and because of that he says let people live how they want to live let them have their faith they want to have it he himself is not going to have it he is not going to be very kind to Christians in terms of his understandings of their dogmas he is still relatively anti Protestant for example he actually hates the Presbyterians he finds them to be a big bore and pretty annoying but still Voltaire is one of the more radicals in the 18th century and that he is calling for policies that would live in accord with the conclusions of the Enlightenment but if preliminary if it is something that is a relative then stop trying to oppose or suppress those who differ from you so in the end Voltaire is philosophically the heir to a lot of changes in the Enlightenment from Descartes and others through the teachings of lock down until his days in the 18th century he has one of the clearest calls for cessation to religious violence and more importantly for the restructuring of politics that would allow for the voice of the everyday person not to have to suffer under tyranny

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 70,240

Rating: 4.8334985 out of 5

Keywords: Age Of Enlightenment (Literature Subject), Voltaire (Author), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ryan M. Reeves, John Locke (TV Character), Isaac Newton (Academic), Protestantism (Religion), 18th Century (Event)

Id: NYfVGQp_g68

Length: 26min 9sec (1569 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2015