In his piece, Franklin and the Enlightenment, Frank Kelleter is quick to point out that the Enlightenment was far from a “unified intellectual movement” (Kelleter, 77). However, he goes on to explain that despite the oceans and decades separating the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, their contributions can indeed be lumped together under this vague, vast “heading” (Kelleter, 77). What links the many ideas and ideals produced during the Enlightenment? According to Kelleter, it is the fact that each was produced in “a common attempt to redefine the meaning of human reason” (Kelleter, 77). A definition this broad is bound to encompass a large variety of work, creating a body of ideas full of inconsistencies and negations.
All of the thinkers of the enlightenment seem to be on a mission to find Truth through free inquiry. From Bacon to Kant, it appears that the major figures of the Enlightenment felt that reason and truth would be found away from the social norms that governed learning and behavior. Yet, one of the biggest differences in the ideas of each thinker was where and how one went about finding the “truth.”
Philosophers like Descartes sought truth by looking inside themselves. According to d’Alembert, Descartes sought “knowledge derived from himself, more than from books” (d’Alembert, 9). By rejecting everything he had been taught, Descartes found that he “had doubted everything, but he could not doubt himself” (Kramnick, xv). In his Introduction, Kramnick points out that Descartes’ rejection of all previous societal indoctrination was “reinforced” by the Lockean idea of the mind as a “blank slate” (Kramnick, xv). In addition, Kelleter’s piece highlights Francis Hutcheson’s thoughts on morality. Hutcheson believed that once freed from “authoritarian influences” our emotions and inner feelings would provide humankind with self-evident truths (Kelleter, 81).
In contrast, Bacon and Newton go about their search for enlightenment by collecting and categorizing facts about the natural world, focusing on the necessity of systematic, scientific experimentation. D’Alembert describes Bacon’s work as amounting to a simple statement: “Here is the little bit that you have learned; this is what remains to be learned. Franklin, in contrast, seems to focus on himself as model, or subject on which to do experiments, yet was also constantly collecting information from the outside world.
It seems to me that these disparate views of where truth and reason reside (in the self, or in the outside world?) create a tension in the works of Enlightenment scholars. It is difficult to relate such ideas to each other beyond the notion that each was created as the result of a rigorous and systematic search for truth that rejected scholastic, institutional methods.
