The Enlightenment is the primary point of orientation for modern political and philosophic thinking. By the "Enlightenment" I mean not the eighteenth century age of Voltaire and Diderot, but the doctrines of nature, personality, and political society by which the seventeenth century philosophers established the foundations of a new humanity.

Modern thinkers take their bearings from the Enlightenment in one of three different ways. First, they characteristically endorse the goals and doctrines of the Enlightenment, although often seeking to strengthen or clarify its foundations. This first group includes, of course, Bacon, the first of the several co-founders of the Enlightenment, and Kant, who placed an epigraph from Bacon on the title page of the Critique of Pure Reason; but also such twentieth century figures as Dewey and Bertrand Russell.

All the later groups reject the Enlightenment's sense of consciously making a break with tradition either by the "universal doubt" of Descartes or by some other methodological means. How then did the Enlightenment itself understand the tradition with which it broke? As a hybrid of two traditions: it confronted the still powerful medieval scholasticism, on the one hand, and ancient classical philosophy, on the other. The distinction between the two traditions is made quite forcibly by Bacon and Descartes, for example. Did the Enlightenment seek to break with both antiquity and the Middle Ages? Such a double breach in the seventeenth century is regarded by present day "revisionist" scholars as moot: think only of the ambiguity of Descartes' theocentric metaphysics of substance. But by the end of the eighteenth century, that is, with Immanuel Kant, the double breach with the tradition is quite clear.

We can then distinguish a second group that rejects the double breach with tradition and endeavors to synthesize parts of the tradition, ancient or medieval, with the modern doctrines. Here the major examples are Leibniz, Rousseau, and the supreme instance, Hegel, for whom the first questioning of the legitimacy of the moderns takes the form of a partial restoration of the pre-moderns.

For a third group, the Enlightenment in its entirety is rejected. Its defects are attributed to the grand tradition of western metaphysics originating in antiquity, especially in Platonic philosophy. Here the very distinction of ancient and modern loses its importance. This third group consists primarily of Nietzsche and Heidegger. We could even add a fourth group which makes the alleged errors of the Enlightenment, especially Cartesian rationalism, into solemn warnings against any attempt to philosophize.

THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT

We now ask: why is the Enlightenment such a universal point of reference, long after its alleged doctrines have come under formidable attacks? We limit ourselves to two or three suggestions. The Enlightenment explicitly modeled itself, as we know from Bacon, on the Platonic model: evil will not cease in the cities unless philosophers rule or kings philosophize. From the start, the Enlightenment endeavored to remove the obstacles that made the Platonic proposal a dream and never an actuality. It sought to exclude the merely speculative and to adhere to the effective and useful. And it succeeded: to an amazing extent the Enlightenment succeeded in establishing the power of modern knowledge in society. It is the first and the only philosophy to have laid the foundations of an age; but that means that in some sense it is the first philosophy to have brought a prior age to an end.. We can now make more precise our two-sided relation to the Enlightenment. Since our modern sciences and technology are primarily of sixteenth and seventeenth century origin, and our dominant political form, the representative democracies of the West and Japan, is also of seventeenth century origin, the Enlightenment is the abiding source of our dominant institutions. I return to these two cases below.

On the other hand, although these two dominant forms of Enlightenment have great and undeniable benevolent aspects, they are not informed by a predominant morality or wisdom. We do not have an Enlightenment or a modern morality or wisdom that can justify the benevolence of the Enlightenment. Still less do we have an Enlightenment or modern morality or wisdom that can carry out the critique of the imperfections of Enlightenment or of contemporary society which is so obviously needed. Instead of a critique made from the standpoint of modern Enlightenment reason, we need a critique of modern Enlightenment reason itself. The obstacle to this critique is just the benevolence of the Enlightenment itself. Our gratitude for the rights of the individual, including the right to freedom of speech, which have been effective bars to the tyranny of the one or of the mob makes us hesitate to scrutinize too closely the intellectual pedigree of Enlightenment.

But what compels us to this inquiry is the dire extremity of our situation: here I speak primarily out of the American experience. A grave corruption, a creeping nihilism, corrodes American institutions in the 1990s on a scale never hitherto imaginable. It attacks our educational institutions, our national representative government and our state governments. It is visible in family life, with the horrendous statistics on divorces, parentless children, and homeless individuals, and in the psycho-sexual problems of human identity. Above all it shows in the lack of confidence in the capacity of human intelligence to guide our lives and our government.

From the outset the Enlightenment knew that it required a moral justification, but it knew also that it did not possess one. The Enlightenment was, as it was called by Bacon and Descartes, a project, that is an incomplete program. Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes and Locke, all these co-founders of Enlightenment wrote treatises on methodology meant to give rules for seeking knowledge in all branches of knowledge. But these methodologies apply to physics or to human knowledge that does not include morality or human virtue. Bacon says his method was meant to apply to moral and civil or political knowledge, but he did not achieve this, which is the reason why his New Organon seems to be a fragment. Virtually all of the Enlightenment methodologies are only fragments, probably for the same reason. Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, lays down a provisional morality; he never attained any doctrine that he called, or that scholars think, is a definitive morality. The moral basis on which Bacon and Descartes rely is a combination of a judgment that traditional morality was impotent to protect human freedom, and a recognition that all men agree that bodily wants, and freedom from the interference of others, are goods that must be satisfied. For example, Descartes says that the "preservation of health is without doubt the chief blessing and the foundation of all other blessings in this life" (Discourse VI). Descartes offered also a wisdom of the life of the passions, a hedonistic analysis that does not yield any account of justice or of moral duty.

To consider the initial situation of the Enlightenment more fully, I would distinguish between two kinds of Enlightenment, one whose core is natural philosophy or physics, and the other the human or political philosophy. The great exponents of the new natural philosophy are Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton; they do not write political treatises. The great exponents of political philosophy are Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau; they accomplish little or nothing in natural philosophy. The implication is clear: the route to political philosophy is not through natural philosophy. There is, however, this common ground between the natural and political philosophy of Enlightenment: nature, so far from being a standard of goodness, or a limit of evil, is something to be mastered, as in the methodological writings of Bacon and Descartes; or nature is something evil to be fled, as is the state of nature for Hobbes. We can identify the difficulty that leads to the abyss between the natural and the human: the science of nature aims at laws of nature, such as the law of inertia; but there are no laws of human nature known to the Enlightenment.

What then was the strategy, the successful strategy, pursued by Hobbes and the political philosophers of Enlightenment? The starting point is the great axiom of all Enlightenment science, natural and human: all final causality must be excluded. The attack on final causality begins with Bacon and Machiavelli; it continues in our day in the methodological writings of Ernest Nagel, the pragmatists and positivists. What is excluded is final causality in nature including human nature; what is not always excluded is final causality in the so-called historical process.

Final causality is denied because it is anthropomorphic, arising from human nature, but especially from man's religious nature. Man attributes purposes to nature because of his desire to see nature as benevolent to man, as a divine benefactor. In Book I of his Politics, Aristotle says that "nature does nothing in vain." He is confusing nature with God, according to Francis Bacon. The thesis that nature is good and hence a standard is the premise of the morality, personal and political, of the classical tradition of natural right and law, from Plato and Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas. All pre-modern natural theories known to me presuppose final causality as the premise of morality; and all modern natural right theories presuppose the denial of final causality. This engenders the peculiar solitude of the Enlightenment individual as an atom without natural relations to the whole of which he is a part, whether that whole is political, or whether it is the universal whole.

THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL RIGHTS

Consider now Thomas Hobbes, the founding father of Enlightenment political philosophy. Hobbes is the discoverer of the natural rights of the individual. These rights are prior to all duties; the individual has perfect rights, he has no perfect duties. These rights are anterior to government; government exists for the sake of guaranteeing that rights, or legitimate claims, are made actual by society. This is the most influential political doctrine ever discovered, gaining in recognition decade by decade all over the globe. It has been repeatedly denied and refuted by philosophers, not only by Marx and his followers but also, for example, recently by Alasdair MacIntyre. However, examples of its being denied by politicians or statesman are exceedingly rare. The universal claim to human rights has become an autonomous fact of political life, invulnerable to all merely rational refutation. The doctrine of rights has been an instrument used to establish the independence of nations, and a defense against tyranny within nations. We might exclaim, "What does it matter if the philosophers find it questionable?" as discovered and justified by a philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. We must endeavor to understand it.

Hobbes excluded final causality from nature; therefore, we might suppose, he excluded the summum bonum, the ultimate or final end, from his account of human nature. But according to the most authoritative accounts of his philosophy Hobbes does not in fact argue from scientifically known nature to human nature. It is of the utmost importance that his denial of the summum bonum is argued solely from human experience, for the denial of the summum bonum is the negative condition of his doctrine of natural rights. The importance of this fact is that the authoritative weight of natural science is not placed by Hobbes on the side of the modern natural rights doctrine. Accordingly, the denial of the summum bonum rests on what is accessible to humans as humans, on ordinary human experience. There is no summum bonum, says Hobbes, because whenever we do attain the object of our desire we always seek something more, or different, or at least the secure possession of what we have. And we try to imagine that one good which would give us secure and permanent satisfaction of all our desires. Thus far, Hobbes is laying down the skeptical premise of his politics: reason, indeed no human reason of any individual, can know the good for man. Therefore reason cannot rule over the desires and passions; instead, reason is the instrument of the desires and passions.

But the strongest passion is the passion for life, or what is the same, the fear of death: man cannot help pursuing life or fleeing death; therefore there is a right to life. There is no summum bonum by nature, but by nature death is the summum malum. In this way Hobbes expresses the fundamental hostility of nature to man, which in his view justifies the fundamental hostility of man to nature; this he expresses in the goal of philosophy: the mastery of nature. Thus the primordial human right, the right to life, arises from a nest of assumptions in which man's mutual tension with nature is the predominant thesis. Within this tension, nature is the initial aggressor and man the sufferer.

Since there is no knowledge of the good for mankind, any one man's good is as good as any other's. As Locke put it, each man has his own summum bonum, or his own pursuit of happiness, just as men have different palates. Just as one man's taste runs to cheese or lobsters, apples or plums, so another man's taste in the highest good may run to riches, or bodily delights, or virtue or the contemplation of truth. But since no man can have the support of knowledge for his choice of the good, each man's life is shadowed by the knowledge of the groundlessness of his choice. Life is uncertainty as regards the end.

The means to the end, therefore, assumes unusual importance; for most men the means to the end will be wealth. Precisely because there is no knowledge of the human end, the dominant end of human society tends to become the pursuit of wealth. The pursuit of a happiness which is outside our power because unknowable, turns into the pursuit of wealth which may be only a means, but is at least within our power. Thus the pursuit of wealth tends to become an end in itself. As Montesquieu observed, the ancient republics were primarily devoted to virtue as their end or goal, whereas the modern republics are devoted to commerce and money. Locke had legitimated the pursuit of an unlimited amount of wealth, but not on the ground of a labor theory of value. Rather he believed that the acquisitive desire of the entrepreneur would be the engine that would produce an increase of the standard of material life for all. A rising tide will lift all boats, in the words of President Kennedy. This argument was taken over to support the American Constitution in the Federalist Papers No. 10; the protection of the different and unequal capacities to acquire property is a first object of government.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND TRANSCENDENCE

From Rousseau, the severest critic of the Enlightenment, we learn that all the defects of the Enlightenment are to be referred to its lack of transcendence. Moreover, all attempts to remedy this lack involve the concepts of nature, of human nature, or non-human nature or both. Finally, we learn from Rousseau's example, that if we limit our reform of the account of human nature by accepting modern natural science as the standard, we do more damage than good to the Enlightenment model. These observations, here adumbrated in brief and cryptic form, suggest the key points of the following reflection on the example of Rousseau.

Rousseau recognized that the primary human right of the Enlightenment, the right to life, or self-preservation, presupposes that life is good in and by itself, or naturally. But nothing is naturally good, according to the Enlightenment; Enlightenment morality needs the support of a nature it has repudiated. The human individual must transcend its own needs and passions, by recourse to nature, if it is to discover the good. Rousseau turns to the study of nature in the Second Discourse. He places on its title page a passage from Aristotle, which says that we must learn from nature about good and bad. Rousseau studies man in the pure state of nature, prior to the development of human reason, language and sociability. He discovers that natural man is guided by the sweet sentiment of the goodness of his own existence: life itself is naturally good. This original and natural sentiment can be recovered by civilized man through inner meditation.

This rediscovery of the goodness of nature suggests that Rousseau returned to a teleological account of nature. But this proves far from the truth. Rousseau accepted the mechanical, non-teleological natural science of Descartes and Newton, according to which the evolution of human nature is the blind consequence of chance and necessity. Therefore reason and imagination which emerged in the historical evolution do not belong to the higher nature of man, but rather to the artificial and utilitarian. In his book on education, Emile, Rousseau experimented with nature as supplying the telos or end for the nurture and education of men and women. But the telos of men and women is to be married to a member of the opposite sex; no higher telos is suggested. Why this low ceiling? Because Rousseau is using teleology as a heuristic device to solve a political problem: marriage has the function of overcoming the asociality of man. Rousseau accepts from Hobbes that man does not need political life to achieve his natural end. For just as in Hobbes man has no natural end.

The Enlightenment began with the quest for perfection, a quest that would transcend every prior attempt at perfection, ancient or medieval. Bacon gives us several reflections on the ancient practice of apotheosis, the elevation to divinity of the supreme benefactors of the human race. Similarly, Descartes, in the original title of his book, the Discourse on Method, sought a method that would raise mankind to the highest perfection of which it was capable. The god-like perfection of supreme benevolence is the Enlightenment goal.

But to achieve perfection as benevolence, it would have been necessary to recognize that human perfection is not the auto-achievement of the solitary individual, however grand his genius. The possibility of human perfection of whatever kind must be grounded in the divine whole which is the source of the being of man. The final cause of the excellence of man cannot be desire for superiority to one's fellow man, but the excellence of the whole: to be is to be a part.

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

One way of contrasting pre-Enlightenment to Enlightenment thought, especially in England and North America, is to see the former as specified according to the laws of nature and thus within a context of a teleology, whereas the latter is precisely against a teleology. This might derive from the skeptical character of late medieval nominalism which, to restrictive, considered the notion of a summum bonum to be too exalted, or to the new aspirations of human freedom which considered any human conception of a supreme good or teleology to be too restrictive. At any rate, Hobbes' experiment attempted to rearticulate all on the basis of a type of summum malum, namely, nature as a threat to man.

In this context the urge to survive becomes central and the basis for the right to life. All then becomes a series of artifices and compromises for the exercise of this right in a situation of multiple persons, groups and positions. Further, the lack of a goal shifts the emphasis to means, such as the pursuit of wealth, which then become all important.

Rousseau reflects a continental critique of this Enlightenment vision, especially of its lack of a sense of nature. To state nature without teleology he turns to an originary pure condition of men. This launches him upon a critique of subsequent scientific and social development, which can only compromise the original goodness. Consequently his aspirations for man are low, for they concern healing the fissures in originary nature.

What seems lacking is a perspective which transcends the individual human and his passion for superiority over others. For this one must look to a divine source or ground as the basis for an excellence of the whole within which all parts can thrive together.

Eventually, this points to the need for a metaphysics, for while other dimensions of human thought make important contributions they become destructive when left to themselves to carry out the entire task of providing understanding for human life. Thus, for example, the formalism of Kant can be an important help in decentering our concerns from egoism, but is not sufficient positively to motivate and engage a person's life.

Further, the foundations of the American Revolution in its protest against tyranny and its proposition that all are created equal are important points of departure. Indeed, as bench marks which must not be rejected or compromised they seem often undervalued in our day. Nonetheless, they leave the great challenge of actually living one's freedom. Critical theories and propositions of justice may help in conflict resolution, but are not sufficient to respond to requirements of family, community and nation which can be articulated, if at all, only in terms of sacrifice and love. For these most important and formative dimensions of our life we need another calculus which does not ignore but transcends the issue of rights.

There is in this a real test for the sufficiency of a philosophy. Empirical and materialist philosophies can look at talk of purpose only as magical because it goes beyond the confines of the senses. As such an attitude leaves one without sufficient guidance for truly human life in community, it is necessary to reassess the limitations they have placed upon philosophy in their reductionist search for clarity and control. By attempting to say that reality is "nothing but" what is clear to the senses, the urge for survival, etc., one may be carrying out an interesting pattern of conceptualization. Unfortunately, as philosophy influences living, reductionisms become brutal mental lobotomies which shrink people's lives.

In this light metaphysics can become important if it itself can avoid forcing all into a limited view of reality as idea. For Aristotle metaphysics was precisely the treatise which defied restriction to specific sectors of man or of reality; for Thomas it was initiated by a negative rather than positive judgment, i.e., the sedulous removal of any and all limitation in order to enable the science to take account of all that is or can be, and in whatsoever manner. For the personalists it is this open character of the human spirit that suggests beginning from human intentional openness and following this transcendent mode to a foundation of beings which both in principle and in fact is unlimited. Metaphysics alone provides this liberating context for philosophy; without it philosophy becomes a restrictive ideology.