Stumble it!Enlightenment Theory, Freedom and the Communal Good
posted in Philosophy, Society by themaiden |Enlightenment theorists argued for the power of reason to direct human activity, a process Immanuel Kant, in the opening lines of What is Enlightenment?, described as “man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.” Kant, and other Enlightenment thinkers chided humanity to think for itself, to reason from evidence and to leave behind authoritarian sources of knowledge such as, to again quote Kant, “a book which provides meaning for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who will judge my diet for me.”
In arguing that people cut themselves loose from traditional sources of authority and instead rely upon reason alone, enlightenment ideas had, at least potentially, the ability to destabilize society in catastrophic ways, and while enlightenment thinkers were looking to provoke substantial social change they were not looking to have society collapse altogether.
The society into which enlightenment ideas was born was one thoroughly saturated with authoritarian structures, both civil and religious. These structures were the glue that held society together, and had been for centuries. Removing them could plausibly lead to havoc. Without the framework provided by such institutions such as the Church and the monarchy to check them, individuals may reason to very different conclusions about what is good for society or about is good human behavior, or worse, may simply run a muck, reasoning very little.
Enlightenment thinkers feared such consequences and realized that they must somehow provide replacements for the social structures they advocated removing, that they must somehow provide new frameworks for thinking about human behavior and governance. Of the several attempts made at such new frameworks, one of the more enduring has been that of philosopher John Locke.
Locke argued rational underpinning for a re-envisioned society by arguing that humanity must have originally entered into society– that is, into cooperative arrangements with one another– from a “state of nature” in order to better preserve the “lives, liberties, and possessions” of the individuals of that new society. Individuals joined together, agreeing to live by and to enforce a set of rules of behavior intended to better protect themselves and their possessions. He writes:
Political power is that power, which every man having in the state of nature, has given up into the hands of the society… with the express and tacit trust, that it shall be employed for their good.
In other words, humans created government in order to secure a safe, or safer, existence. Thus Locke has a rational basis upon which to build the rules– the laws and the restrictions– necessary for social order, and he needs to appeal only to human needs to do so.
While Locke is typically thought of as having created a theory of government, this idea gives Locke a base from which to evaluate both government and individual human behavior. Behavior at odds with the contract is either criminal, or cause for revolution. Behavior in tune with the contract is allowable. Since this rule applies across the board to both governments and individuals Locke can argue for limits upon governmental power but he can also argue for limits upon individual freedoms as well. People may behave freely only insofar as they maintain the terms of the primordial contract at the root of human society.
Another enlightenment thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, based his social philosophy upon the idea a state of nature and of a social contract. For Rousseau, men existed free in a state of nature but eventually “reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual” and the state of nature could be maintained no longer. At this point, people must “find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain free as before.”
The “form of association” is social contract in which, unlike in Locke, the individual gives all rights and freedoms to the community as a whole– it is the “total alienation of each associate, together with his rights, to the whole community”. Yet Rousseau also argues that “to renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties… Such a renumeration is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.”
To reconcile these two seemingly incompatible ideas– the one focusing upon the community, the common good, and the other focusing upon the individual– Rousseau appeals to an argument about men as they are in his conception of the state of nature. Men, he argues, in the state of nature are absolutely free and unbridled, limited only by what they can take by their own strength. Rousseau suggests that such a state can only be maintained up to a point, after which “the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence…” That change means communal life, life in which man must think not only of his own impulses and appetites, but must reason and “act on different principles” for the common good. The change must be made from the state of nature to civil society or “the human race will perish” and this means that men must relinquish completely the freedoms had in the state of nature. For Rousseau, if any individuals retained such rights, then those individuals would continue to function as if in the state of nature, the new association would fail to function and the state of nature would continue.
Since, Rousseau argues, everyone relinquishes rights equally and completely, no individual gains any rights over any other individual. Out of this leveling arises the “general will”, or the emergent conscience of the collective of which all individuals partake. From obedience to this general will– this “law which we prescribe to ourselves”– arises a new kind of freedom which Rousseau terms “civil liberty”. The freedoms of the state of nature are replaced by the civil liberties of the new society. This exchange Rousseau considers to be a great gain for humanity, being at once the freedom from the slavery of the impulse of appetite, the arrival of justice in the workings of human affairs, and the acquisition, for the first time, of a stamp of morality upon human actions.
Both Locke and Rousseau argue from plausible assumptions about the living conditions of early humanity and build their conceptions both of government and of the meaning and nature of individual liberty upon that foundation. Typical of enlightenment thinkers, their appeals are to reason and not to authority. The strengths of their conclusions rest in the strengths of their arguments not in the power or prestige of the person professing the conclusion.
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