The Enlightenment was a complex and diverse philosophical movement which cannot easily be summarized. Nevertheless, one can identify certain broad themes of the Enlightenment which were shared with the positivist movement of the late 19th century. These traits included three particularly important ones: the elevation of reason; a belief in the perfectibility (and progress) of both humans and institutions; and an emphasis on empiricism and natural science as the most legitimate form of gaining understanding. Of course there were differences between the Enlightenment and positivism; positivists generally rejected metaphysics as useless, while Enlightenment philosophers were engaged in critical debates over metaphysics (Kant, for example). Nonetheless, to the extent that positivism and the Enlightenment shared the three values above, one must see certain late 19th and early 20th century thinkers – most notably Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Max Weber (1864-1920) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) – as offering various critiques of the Enlightenment insofar as it had been adopted by the positivist movement.
It would be too simplistic to say that these thinkers rejected the Enlightenment, but they each posed challenges to the prevailing positivist culture. In Freud, this meant challenging the assumption that man was governed by reason. Max Weber’s ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (first published in 1904) offered a challenge to the idea that humanity was progressing in any meaningful way. Finally, Nietzsche offered the most comprehensive and explicit rejection of Enlightenment and positivist values: not only did he reject reason as the quality which motivated man, but he also rejected the possibility of objective truth and even the autonomy of the individual on which much of the Enlightenment project depended. In spite of this, I will suggest that, paradoxically, of the three major thinkers under discussion, only Nietzsche shares the essential optimism which helped to characterize the Enlightenment.
An exposition of the positivist values which had been inherited from the Enlightenment was given by Emile Zola in his essay ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1893). Zola suggested that literary authors ought to adopt the scientific method as a means of understanding the world through fiction. The complex relationship between the positivists and those reacting to positivism is brought out very well when one considers the treatment of determinism in Zola as compared with determinism in Freud. In neither of the two thinkers was determinism the same thing as fatalism: both Freud and Zola believed that one could alter the conditions of one’s existence in order to bring about change. Zola, echoing the Enlightenment philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751), writes “man’s body is a machine” (171). It follows for Zola that the organization of society is much like that of the individual body: driven by causal and deterministic laws. The whole purpose of the experimental method (and, by extension, the experimental novel) is “to study phenomena in order to control them” (176). Freud also conceived of his own project in terms of the experimental method. He saw himself first and foremost as a scientist, as he demonstrates when he writes in the ‘Dora case’ (1905) that he has “duties not only towards the individual patient but towards science as well” (174). Freud invites his critics to “contradict this theorem [of sexuality’s importance] or to limit its scope”. Freud believed that a person’s outward behaviour was determined by inner mental processes of the unconscious or, as Freud writes, “A whole number of the phenomena of the everyday life of healthy people – such as forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled actions and a particular class of errors – owe their origins to a psychical mechanism analogous to that of dreams and of the other members of the series”. These phenomena – as well as many apparently physical ailments – are the result of the displacement of thoughts which would be unacceptable to one’s conscious mind. All of this highlights Freud’s complex relationship with positivism and the Enlightenment values inherited by the positivists. On the one hand, Freud was rejecting reason as the highest principle or determining factor in man’s behaviour. At the same time, Freud was accepting that only through the experimental method, empirical study and the rational interpretation of the unconscious (especially dreams) could one demonstrate the truth of his theory. Where Freud obviously differs with both Enlightenment thinkers and their positivist inheritors is in the role to which he assigns reason. Reason is not sovereign in Freud’s thinking and man is by no means defined principally by his ability to reason.
If Freud was posing interesting questions about one tenet of Enlightenment/positivist thought, another tenet was being challenged by both Weber and Nietzsche: the belief in the progress of humanity. The Enlightenment approach to progress was more or less a meliorist one, but the positivists took this further. Expressing the positivist view, Zola writes that man can, “be master of good and evil, to regulate life, to regulate society...” (177). Zola is not only expressing a belief in the progress of institutions or material wealth, but in the progress of man as a moral agent too. This view is most explicitly rejected in Nietzsche, but Max Weber offers a more nuanced critique of it in his ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’. Like Freud, Weber is concerned with portraying himself as an objective analyst, and to this extent he is in the Enlightenment tradition of the search for truth. Nonetheless, one can detect in Weber’s work a lamentation for something meaningful that has been lost in modern forms of capitalism. Weber’s explanatory mechanism for the rise of modern capitalism is located in the Protestant Reformation, particularly in the Calvinist tradition and its emphasis on man’s labour – and his accumulation of wealth – as a ‘calling’ which demonstrates that he is one of the elect. This was stated most simply in the maxim: “God helps those who help themselves”.
The story of capitalism does not have a happy end for Weber. There is no moral progress to be found. Although Weber tries to maintain an air of objectivity, writing that he mustn’t be brought, “to the world of judgments of value and of faith”; one can see clearly a nostalgia for a time before capitalism had been separated from the Protestant notion of a calling, which now “prowls our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs”. Weber concludes his analysis of the modern condition of capitalism with an indictment of the arrogance of the belief in progress: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved”.
It is in the writing of Nietzsche where one finds the most explicit and comprehensive rejection of both Enlightenment and positivist ideals. Like Freud, Nietzsche rejects reason as the most important part of man’s existence. Indeed, Nietzsche’s philosophy of perspectivism rejected the very concept of objective truth. Instead, man is driven by his will. In Nietzsche’s later work, ‘will’ had come to mean the diverse and driving force which is identical with people. People are will in the later Nietzsche. This has two implications for his relationship to the Enlightenment. Firstly, human beings do not have what we would call ‘free will’; this is a deterministic model in which actions are decided by the will. Thus, Nietzsche writes, “To expect that strength will not manifest itself as strength ... is every bit as absurd as to expect that weakness will manifest itself as strength. A quantum of strength is equivalent to a quantum of urge, will, activity...” Nietzsche went even further than this, denying the very existence of the individual subject. So much of the Enlightenment, and to a lesser extent the positivist, project had emphasised the elevation of the individual and the possibility of his development. Kant wrote that Enlightenment was “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’, but for Nietzsche, such a task was impossible. There was no subject (man) to complete the task; this was the “snare of language” which deludes us and causes us to “divorce lightning from its brilliance”. This is not only a rejection of man’s autonomy – a crucial feature of the Enlightenment – but of our ability to treat people as separate from their actions.
In spite of this, Nietzsche’s philosophy is not a pessimistic one, and only he of the three major thinkers discussed here offers the possibility of an escape from the values he sought to challenge. Freud, having established that too much emphasis had been placed on reason, nonetheless thought that the unconscious drives to which we are all subject cannot be escaped. Repression and its derivatives (displacement, wish-fulfilment etc.) are the necessary price we pay to live in orderly societies. Weber, too, offered a bleak vision for humanity: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so”, he concludes. Far from the light cloak external goods once were, man was now trapped in an iron cage of capitalism and wealth for its own sake. Only in Nietzsche does one find the possibility of something better. Nietzsche conceived of himself as ‘the last man’ whose purpose was to exorcise the will-to-nothing exemplified by the positivist and Enlightenment values of modernity. He would serve as a bridge between man and ‘superman’ and it is in this faith in something better than Nietzsche can be said to have at least one aspect of the Enlightenment in his thought.