LOGIC AND GRAMMAR

C. D. Clark’s book THE ENLIGHTENMENT is devoted to the claim that the idea of The Enlightenment is a figment of the imagination of the majority of thinkers writing about Western intellectual history. He spends over 500 pages tracking the use of the term “The Enlightenment” in his book by this name, and concludes that this notion is a figment of the Western scholarly imagination. It is a very scholarly effort, but I find its fundamental premise off the mark and thus confusing and misleading.

            Clark claims that there never was any such thing as “The Enlightenment”. Rather, he says, the term ‘enlightenment’, which derives from the notion of “shedding light” or fresh thought should not be used as the name for an entity that never existed. The proper word here, according to Clark, is ‘enlightenment’ with a small first letter, serving as a quality of something, not a thing in itself. In other words, he claims that the term ‘enlightenment’ should not be used as the name for anything other than a state of mind or the goal of education, etc. The idea and claim that there once was a period of intellectual history to be so named is erroneous and misleading.

            However, the fact is that the very title of his book involves the use of a definite article, while the subtitle “An Idea and Its History” involves an indefinite article, thereby seeming to instantiate the very thing Clark is denying actually exists. These not so incidental facts would seem to discredit Clark’s entire enterprise at the outset. However, his basic claim, that there never was anything corresponding to the name “The Enlightenment”, as such, is well worth one’s attention. Clark is claiming that the use of the definite article in connection with this term ‘enlightenment’ erroneously instantiates the existence of such a period in Western history.

            Clark’s term for this seemingly minor yet important grammatical mistake about “the Enlightenment” used to track something in history usually called the Enlightenment is an error of “reification”, which according to Webster’s Dictionary is “an act which treats an abstraction as a substantially existing reality”. In other words, Clark is claiming that placing a definite article in front of the term ‘Enlightenment’ renders it the proper name of a person, place, or thing. His overall claim is that no such period as an “Enlightenment” ever existed. This term only serves as a description of something happens to individual people not periods.

       To put it differently, Clark claims that any period referred to by this misleading term is a figment of the writer’s imagination. People can be “enlightened”, but no such period of time ever actually existed. His book, then, consists of his detailed and interesting tracing of various writers and thinkers who have used the term and/or claimed that such a time period and/or intellectual movement actually existed. Clark likens such a mistake to that involved with the term “Industrial Revolution” or “The Renaissance”.

            In spite of the fact that I found Clark’s volume interesting and worthy of some attention, in the end I think he has made a mountain out of the proverbial “mole hill.” Of course, such terms as the ‘Enlightenment’ and the ‘Renaissance’ can be mistakenly instantiated into designating a well-defined time period. They nonetheless serve as terms that signify a commonly understood reality in history. Does anyone ever actually get confused by such terms into thinking that they refer to actual “things”. Even Alice in Wonderland could sort such issues out. The basic relationship between logic and grammar need not be confused here.

            The remainder of Clark’s volume is devoted to an examination of how various international thinkers and politicians tried to make the most out of what was actually something of a linguistic misnomer. Although The Enlightenment was never an actual political movement, it did leave us with a great number of deep and important thinkers, in spite of perhaps having been misnamed. Clark explains the main ideas of a great many 19^th and 20^th century thinkers, along with the implications and sometimes consequences of their ideas very well.