The Enlightenment and Its Legacy

A network, not a school

The ideas on which the European project rests took shape in the period called the Enlightenment (Fr. les Lumières, Ger. Aufklärung, Eng. the Enlightenment). Roughly, it is the 18th century: from England’s “Glorious Revolution” (1688) to the French Revolution (1789).

The Enlightenment was not a school with a single programme. It was a network of people who read the same books and wrote to one another. They did not agree on everything, but they shared one conviction: human beings can and must use their own reason to understand the world and to organise their life together.

The basic rule of the age: the authority of tradition, the king or the Church is no longer enough. Every claim must show its arguments.

The Encyclopédie: knowledge for everyone

The project that symbolises the age is the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert (1751–1772): 28 volumes meant to gather all human knowledge, from philosophy to the simplest crafts.

The idea behind it was revolutionary: knowledge is not the privilege of an elite. It must be available to anyone who can read.

The Romanian lands also had ties to this world. Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), Prince of Moldavia, was elected a member of the Berlin Academy in 1714. At its request he wrote Descriptio Moldaviae, a description of the country made with the methods of the scholars of the time.

Cantemir belongs more to the period before the Enlightenment proper. But he shows that Moldova was not outside the European “republic of letters”.

Why it matters for European integration

Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union lists the Union’s values: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights. Almost all of them took their modern form in the 18th century.

The tool we use in this course comes from here too: critical thinking.

When you read Article 2, you are in fact reading a summary of the 18th century, passed through the experience of the 20th.

An answer to a magazine’s question

In December 1783, a Berlin pastor, Johann Friedrich Zöllner, asked in a footnote in the Berlinische Monatsschrift: what, in fact, is Enlightenment? We ought to know, he wrote, before we set about enlightening others.

Kant’s answer appeared in the same journal in December 1784. It is only a few pages long, but it has become one of the most widely read texts of modern philosophy.

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. […] Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! This is the motto of enlightenment.”I. Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784)

The phrase sapere aude comes from the Roman poet Horace (Epistles, I, 2) and means “dare to be wise” or “dare to know”.

The immaturity for which we are to blame

Immaturity (Ger. Unmündigkeit): in law, the state of someone who cannot decide alone, because someone else signs on their behalf. Kant uses the word in an intellectual sense: you are “immature” when you let others think for you. The opposite is intellectual maturity.

Notice a detail: immaturity is “self-incurred”, that is, chosen by us. Kant is not talking about people without access to education, but about those who could think for themselves and do not, out of laziness and cowardice. It is comfortable to be immature: you have a book that thinks for you, a spiritual adviser who has a conscience for you, a doctor who decides what you eat (paraphrased).

Today’s guardians are easy to find: the phone that tells you what to read, the influencer who tells you what to believe, the Telegram group that tells you whom to vote for.

Autonomy: giving yourself the law

Kant does not ask us to stop reading books or to stop listening to doctors. He asks us to check, to understand the reasons and to take responsibility for the conclusion.

Autonomy (Gr. autos, “self”, and nomos, “law”): giving yourself the law instead of receiving it from someone else. The opposite is heteronomy: living by a law given by someone else. Example: you get a vaccine because you understood why it is recommended, not just because “that’s what people do”.

Two people can make the same decision: one autonomously, the other heteronomously. The difference lies in the reason.

The public and the private use of reason

How do we reach Enlightenment? Not through revolution, Kant believes. A revolution can remove a despot, but it does not change the way people think: new prejudices take the place of the old ones. The necessary condition is the freedom to make public use of reason.

Here Kant draws a distinction that surprises. The private use of reason is the one we make in an office: as an officer, a civil servant or a clergyman. An officer who receives an order does not debate it on the battlefield. The public use is the one we make before the entire reading public. The same officer may write, as a citizen, an article about the army’s mistakes.

The private use may be restricted. The public use must always be free. Kant praises the King of Prussia, Frederick II, whose motto was supposedly: “Argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, but obey!”

Freedom of expression in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights rests on the same reasoning.

A thought experiment

If people can think for themselves, where does anyone’s right to rule them come from? The traditional answer was: from God, since kings reigned “by the grace of God”, or from tradition.

The philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries offer another answer: political power is legitimate only if it rests on the consent of the governed. To explain it, they use a thought experiment.

The state of nature and the social contract: imagine people without a state, without laws and without police. How would they live? And what would they rationally accept in order to leave this state? The imagined agreement is the social contract. Example: nobody ever signed such a contract, but the question “would you accept these rules?” is a test for any power.

Hobbes: security above all

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) writes Leviathan (1651) after the English Civil War. For him, people are roughly equal in strength and mind. Each pursues their own interest and fears the others. Without a common power, the state of nature is a “war of all against all”: there is no agriculture, trade, science or art, because no one is sure of the fruit of their labour.

“And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”Th. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 13

The solution: people agree to hand almost all their rights to a powerful sovereign, the Leviathan, who guarantees their security. They keep only the right to defend their life.

Hobbes matters because he founds the state on the agreement of individuals, not on divine will. But his conclusion is an almost absolute power.

Locke: rights come before the state

John Locke (1632–1704), in the Second Treatise of Government (1689), is more optimistic. The state of nature is not a permanent war. It is governed by a law of nature that reason can know: people are equal and independent, and no one has the right to harm another “in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (paraphrased).

Natural rights: the rights a person has simply by being human, before any state. In Locke: life, liberty and property. The state does not create them; it exists to protect them.

From here come two ideas on which liberal democracy rests. Power must be limited and must work through known laws, equal for all. And if the government becomes tyrannical, the people have the right to resist it.

Separation of powers: Montesquieu’s idea, in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), that state power must be divided between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, so that “power checks power”. Example: in Moldova, Parliament passes the laws, the Government applies them and the courts judge.

Locke’s ideas inspired the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and, indirectly, the French Declaration of 1789.

Ideas become law

On 26 August 1789, a few weeks after the fall of the Bastille, France’s National Assembly adopts the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In 17 short articles, the ideas of the Enlightenment become a legal text.

“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), Art. 1

In the Declaration we recognise all the authors discussed: Locke’s natural rights (Art. 2: liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression), Rousseau’s law as the “expression of the general will” (Arts 3 and 6) and Montesquieu’s separation of powers (Art. 16).

Here too appear principles we use every day: the presumption of innocence (Art. 9), freedom of opinion, including religious opinion (Art. 10), and the free communication of thoughts (Art. 11).

A line that reaches us

From the Declaration of 1789 runs a line that passes through the great texts of the 20th century and reaches the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova.

Article 1 of the 1994 Constitution says that Moldova is a democratic state governed by the rule of law, in which human dignity, human rights and freedoms are supreme values.

Any citizen who believes their rights have been violated and has exhausted the remedies at home can apply to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

“All people”, but which people?

The Declaration speaks of “men”. In practice, however, political rights belonged to men of property. Three reactions from the same period show the tension.

Olympe de Gouges publishes the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791. If woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she writes, she must also have the right to mount the rostrum (paraphrased). She was executed in 1793.

In the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the enslaved rise up in 1791, invoking the same rights. France abolishes slavery in 1794, and Napoleon restores it in 1802.

Edmund Burke, from the conservative side, criticises “abstract” rights and defends rights inherited through tradition.

Is this a contradiction in principle? Rather, an inconsistent application of the principle. It was precisely the universality of the text that gave the excluded an argument: “You said all people. We are people too.”

A rule of critical thinking: distinguish between criticising an idea and criticising the way it was applied.

A book written in exile

In 1944, two German philosophers of Jewish origin, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), in exile in the United States, write Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947. They belong to the so-called Frankfurt School.

Their question is painful. How was it possible for Germany, the land of Kant, Goethe and Beethoven, one of the most educated and technically advanced societies in the world, to produce Auschwitz? Could the problem lie in the very reason the Enlightenment was so proud of?

“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”M. Horkheimer, Th. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), ch. 1

Instrumental rationality

Their central thesis: the Enlightenment “turned against itself”. Reason, which was meant to free human beings, was gradually reduced to a single question.

Instrumental rationality: thinking that asks only “how do I reach a goal most efficiently?”, without asking “is this goal good?”. Nature becomes raw material to exploit, and the human being becomes an object to be calculated, organised and administered.

The bureaucracy that organised the trains to the extermination camps worked “rationally” in the instrumental sense: efficiently, orderly, punctually. What it lacked was any question about meaning and value.

In the same book, the authors criticise the “culture industry”: mass-produced film and radio, which turn people into passive consumers. Replace radio with social media algorithms, and the critique seems written for us.

Critical thinking, an Enlightenment legacy

Notice something: your own course in “Philosophy and Critical Thinking” is an Enlightenment legacy. Asking for arguments and checking sources are applications of sapere aude.

Even Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique is an exercise in critical thinking. The Enlightenment is a tradition that can criticise itself: perhaps its most European feature.

This shows why intellectual autonomy is a condition of democracy. A free vote presupposes citizens who can weigh the arguments for themselves. When people “hand over” their judgement to a leader, a TV channel or an online group, democracy remains a mere form.

The disinformation campaigns around the constitutional referendum of 20 October 2024 showed that, in the Republic of Moldova too, intellectual maturity is not a theoretical subject. We will return to it in Lecture 12, “Truth, Disinformation, Manipulation”.

Three answers to the question of the lecture

Universal. Enlightenment values belong not to Europe but to reason, which every human being has. That they were first formulated in Europe is a historical accident, just as Pythagoras’ theorem is not “Greek”. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) was drafted by an international commission: alongside the Frenchman René Cassin, the Chinese Peng-chun Chang, the Lebanese Charles Malik and the Indian Hansa Mehta played important roles.

Only European. They express the history and interests of one particular civilisation, and their claim to universality has sometimes served to justify colonialism (“we bring civilisation”). This position is held by some postcolonial critics, but also by authoritarian regimes that reject human rights as “Western values”.

Universal in their claim, European in their formulation. Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and philosopher, showed that the ideas of tolerance and public debate also have roots in other traditions: in the Indian emperor Ashoka (3rd century BC) or the emperor Akbar (16th century). Europe does not own these values; it gave them a legal and institutional form. Their universality is not given from the start: it is earned through dialogue.

Watch out for two fallacies

The genetic fallacy: judging an idea by its origin. Example: “These values appeared in Europe, so they are only European.” The origin of an idea does not decide its validity. Modern medicine is not “only European” either, just because many discoveries were made in Europe.

Tu quoque (Lat. “you too”): rejecting an idea by showing that the person who defends it does not respect it. Example: “Europeans had slavery and colonies, so they have no right to talk about human rights.” The hypocrisy of the person defending an idea does not make the idea false. It only shows that it was applied inconsistently.

Both fallacies are common in public debate about European integration. Recognising them does not tell you which position to choose, but it helps you choose one for good reasons.

Build your position

Answer the question of the lecture using the scheme from Lecture 1. Choose one of the three positions and support it with an example from this lecture.

For the Republic of Moldova, the question also has a practical form. When people say that joining the EU means “taking on foreign values”, it is worth asking: are human dignity, the right to a fair trial or the freedom to speak your mind “foreign” to anyone?

Or are they values we can recognise as our own, because they belong to every human being?