Magic, Science, and Religion: Lecture 1
The Enlightenment and the Science of Man
1. The focus of the second part of the course is on the human sciences. In short, these
are the sciences that take as their object ‘man’ and his social life. In the first lecture,
we will consider the beginnings of the modern human sciences in the Enlightenment,
before turning to the more general themes of this part of the course.
2. The kind of scientific knowledge and methods that emerged in the course of the
Scientific Revolution begin to be applied to moral and political questions in the 17th
C. One of the most famous examples is Thomas Hobbes’s book, Leviathan (1651).
But it is not until nearly a century after Hobbes’s Leviathan that we witness an
awareness of this birth of the science of man. David Hume’s A Treatise of Human
Nature (1739-40), opens with an account of the science of man. In short, Hume is
interested in ‘Moral Subjects’, that is with subjects that concern the behaviour and
beliefs of man in society. However, the purpose of the Treatise was not simply to
provide an account of this or that aspect of the science of man. Hume’s goal was more
ambitious:
Here then is the only expedient, from which we can hope for success in
our philosophical researches, to leave the tedious lingering method, which
we have hitherto followed, and instead of taking now and then a castle or
village on the frontier, to march up directly to the capital or center of these
sciences, to human nature itself; which being once masters of, we may
every where hope for an easy victory. From this station we may extend our
conquests over all those sciences, which more intimately concern human
life, and may afterwards proceed at leisure to discover more fully those,
which are the objects of pure curiosity. . . In pretending therefore to
explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat
system of the sciences built on the foundation almost entirely new, and the
only one upon which they can stand with any security (1).
Hume then was seeking to establish an empirical science of human nature.
Experience of human thought and action is the criteria for establishing
knowledge of the causes and effects of human thought and action.
3. At the heart of the emergence of the science of man in the Enlightenment,
then, was this quest for understanding human nature. This quest for human
nature occurs in the context of important political and social transformations in
the West, in particular the rise of a literate bourgeois public that would come to
challenge the old social and political order of Europe.
There is an important sense human nature did not exist prior to the
Enlightenment. What made it possible was a transformation not only of the
social and political order, but the entire order of knowledge in Western culture.
As the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault argued, the human
sciences ‘appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both
that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known’ (2).
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4. The birth of the human sciences then involves a search for what it is that
unites all human beings, what essential characteristics and capacities they all
share in common. But as the human sciences begin to develop distinct
boundaries and objects, differences between human beings began to appear as
objects of scientific inquiry. In particular, what we can see in the Enlightenment
is the beginnings of empirical sciences concerned with accounting for cultural,
national, and racial differences. The development of the human sciences in this
direction was tied up with important assumptions and questions about the
relationship of Western culture to the rest of the world.
5. By the end of the 18th C, ‘society’ itself had come to form an object of
scientific knowledge (hence the ‘social sciences’) and was increasingly seen as
being subject to laws of development and (moral) progress. This kind of history
of society was designed to take society as its object, and account for the
manifold differences that existed between men in different social contexts. At
bottom, however, it turned on the Enlightenment science of human nature.
6. Over the course of the next seven lectures, we’ll consider how the
Enlightenment science of man develops into various moments of the human
sciences. More specifically, we’ll focus on the answers these sciences – mainly
anthropology, psychology, and sociology – have offered to the kinds of
questions and problems that arose in the Enlightenment. Thus in next week’s
lecture, we’ll address theories of social evolution that attempted to account for
the transition between various stages of human society, and more generally
from primitive to civilised societies. In following weeks, we’ll consider how
anthropologists and psychologists have accounted for the character of the
primitive mind, and the social functions performed by religious and magical
beliefs and practices. In the final two weeks, we’ll turn to perhaps the most
famous account of the rise of the West and its uniqueness: Max Weber’s.
References
(1) Hume, David (1985), A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Penguin, p. 43.
(2) Foucault, Michel (2002), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. London: Routledge, p. 376.
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