When we study the so-called modern age, or Modern age, period that corresponds, didactically speaking, to a space of approximately four centuries (15th to 18th century), we notice that several authors deal with the eighteenth century as being the time when rationalism and scientism peaked, beginning with the scientific and cultural Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This "summit" would have occurred due to the Enlightenment, a movement of ideas that gave the 18th century the epithet of “Century of Lights”. This impression of continuity and progress that we have from the Modern Period is not entirely wrong. However, such an impression was given to us by the chainFrance's Enlightenment, who saw itself as an exponent of Reason in its most advanced stage. The problem is that the Enlightenment was not restricted to the French current. There were two other very important ones, the British and American, or American. to know what is the enlightenment in fact, we need to stick to the set of these three streams.
O French Enlightenment it was the current that became more popular and ended up giving us the image we have of the Modern Period, that is, a time of progress, scientific advances and belief in "reason". Despite having received many influences from the classic rationalism of the 17th century, especially that developed by discards, the exponents of the French Enlightenment had in modern science, effectively started by Galileo and perfected and theorized by Newton, its main model. It was in Newton's philosophical-scientific systems that philosophers like Voltaire they saw the “unity” and “inexorability” of “reason”. “Reason” was the faculty towards which humanity's destiny converged. Through it, all progress, according to the French, could be achieved. As the early 20th century German philosopher Ernst Cassirer says in his work The Enlightenment Philosophy:
The eighteenth century is steeped in faith in the unity and immutability of reason. Reason is one and identical for every thinking individual, for every nation, every epoch, every culture. Of all the variations of religious dogmas, maxims and moral convictions, ideas and theoretical judgments, it stands out a firm and immutable, consistent content, and its unity and consistency are precisely the expression of the very essence of reason. [1]
Newton, unlike Descartes, did not start from axioms, from universal principles towards the knowledge of what was particular. On the contrary, he started from phenomena, from observable and particular empirical data and, through their analysis, arrived at universal concepts – such as that of gravitational force. This theoretical characteristic of Newton, of trying to reach the one, the general, through analysis empirical, gave security to French philosophers of the eighteenth century to extrapolate the use of the category of "reason".
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The faculty of reason, for the French Enlightenment, actually became an object of belief, a belief caricature of religious belief. In the "Encyclopedia" (the main vehicle for the dissemination of the Enlightenment in France), organized by d'alambert and Diderot, one reads that “reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian”. With this phrase, it is evident not only the rejection of Christianity, which is one of the main characteristics of the French Enlightenment, but also the desire of replacing God with rationalism and scientism – a fact that was carried out first by the Jacobins, during the French Revolution, and then fur Positivism atheist, of August Comte.
Unlike the French Enlightenment, the currents of the Enlightenment that developed in countries like Ireland and England, in Europe, and StatesUnited, on the American continent, they did not bet on the power of “reason” as the “flagship” or “engine” of history, of humanity's destiny. According to historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her work Paths to modernity – British, French and American Enlightenment, O British Enlightenment can be defined as "the Age of Benevolence", while the American Enlightenment it would be better qualified as “Policy of Liberty”.
By "Age of Benevolence" we can understand the emphasis on virtues more than in the rational faculty. Virtues like the prudence they are at the base of the British Enlightenment. It is prudence that, for philosophers like Edmund Burke, gives man the resources to understand his destiny and his state of communion with other human beings. This is because prudence is born from past experience, it is born from tradition. It is in the past that the premises and models of a healthy civilization lie, and not in an uncertain future, built by “reason” and revolution. O American Enlightenment is, in large part, heir of the British, but part of that heritage has been improved in some points, especially with regard to the economy and politics of the freedom, which, combined with the Puritan religious tradition, produced a singularly prosperous civilization indebted to traditional values in the States. United.
Thus, whenever we think about Enlightenment, we must take into account the different perspectives that we have on this topic so that we are not stuck in the image of the 18th century as merely the “Century of Lights".
GRADES
[1] CASSIRER, Ernst. The Philosophy of Enlightenment. Trans. Alvaro Cabral. Campinas, São Paulo: Ed. Unicamp, 1992. P. 23
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
