The Enlightenment

I. The Encyclopédie: Organizing Knowledge for the Modern World

• Traditional knowledge provided by church and state authorities is nothing but superstition and prejudice and keeps people dependent and unhappy.
• We can gain knowledge simply by applying our reason as individuals.
• Nature is a giant mechanism, like a clock, and God is the master clockmaker.
• Scientific knowledge of nature enables us to understand, control, and ultimately change the material world, which helps us to improve the human condition.
• Limitless progress, and increasing societal happiness, is possible if only governmental and societal institutions are reformed.

II. Big Thinkers

    A. The Inspiration: John Locke (1637-1704)

• All knowledge derives from the senses, not from innate ideas or mystical, spiritual ideas (empiricism).
• The human mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa): individuals are therefore, in principle, born equal and infinitely malleable, educable, and improvable.
• Reason orders and combines sense data into complex and abstract ideas.
• All individuals have natural rights, including rights to property.
• All legitimate government is founded on contracts among individuals possessing natural rights.

B. The Critic: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

• "Civilization" has become a dehumanizing machine; scientific materialism and technical improvements are detrimental to spiritual life.
• Individualism and the pursuit of luxury have produced inequality and corruption.
• We need to get back to nature, to our authentic selves, and to appreciate primitive cultures and the simple life.
• The moral life consists in living with virtue in a political community where all individuals are equal and cooperate to produce the "general will."

C. The Redeemer: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Reason can be redeemed in the face of skepticism as the source of our understanding and our morality.
• There are two worlds: one of sensory perceptions, and one of innate ideas.
• We can't know things-in-themselves, the world behind our sensory perceptions, but our minds are naturally equipped to organize sense data in terms of categories like space, time, and number.
• We can construct a system of ethics, of dos and don'ts, through our reason by always acting in accordance with the "categorical imperative."
• Enlightenment consists in the "exit from self-incurred tutelage." Tutelage is the inability to make use of one's reason without aid from another.
• Absolute freedom of one's public (though not private) reason is necessary for Enlightenment.

III. The Freemasons: Living the Enlightenment

• Secrecy, a retreat from the public sphere, is necessary to provide a sanctuary for truth and to protect Enlightenment from the profanity and corruption of the as-yet-unenlightened outside world.
• Emotional bonds of friendship, brotherhood, and love are needed to supplement the cold and sterile rationality of the Enlightenment.
• There are mystical truths accessible only through spiritual and emotional experience and not through our immediate sensory perceptions.
• Rituals and a belief in the Supreme Being can provide a tolerant complement to Christian ritual and belief open to people of all faiths.
• History is not just an endless record of superstition and error but a repository for ancient and mystical wisdom and knowledge (especially from the Egyptians, the Hebrews, and the Greeks).

Images from inside the Temple!