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In what ways did Enlightenment thinkers confront the question of human diversity?
By the 18th century, Europeans knew a lot about the people in the other parts of the world. The strong commercial connections with the Atlantic were by the point hundreds of years old. Europeans had traveled throughout North and South America. Also, by the 18th century, news was coming back of Cook's voyages to the Pacific. There was a tremendous amount of information in circulation about peoples in other parts of the world. For Enlightenment thinkers, this spawned a series of reflections that can be summarized in three general areas of critical reflection.
It led Enlightenment thinkers, first of all, to ask some questions about human nature itself. Did all of the peoples they had observed in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia and the Pacific, share some sort of universal human qualities? Or were they different in some fundamental way? Within the Enlightenment there was a strong presumption of universality, that there was something that all humans shared. But this presumption led them to ask why, then, these peoples were so different. This prompted some questions about the history of these cultures. Did they change? Were they fixed or stagnant? Were they stuck at some stage of development? What many Enlightenment thinkers decided was that in general there is one path to civilization and Europeans had somehow by force of circumstance - climate was often brought up in this connection - had managed to achieve a more advanced stage, whereas people in other parts of the world had become stuck or had not completely developed and were therefore seen as primitive, as at an earlier stage of this singular path of development.
Of course, once people began to think about civilization in these terms and to understand human diversity in light of this civilizing process, they began to ask some questions about whether or not it was a good thing. Was civilization itself progress, or had something been lost in the long journey from a kind of primitive state. Here is where many Enlightenment thinkers really differed. Many people endorsed and believed in a notion of progress and believed that the human spirit of rationality guaranteed, in some sense, improvements in material well-being, culture, and knowledge.
Others weren't so sure. Most famously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau questioned the notion of progress at the heart of civilization and in a very subtle critique suggested that civilization, the need to live with others within a society, forced people to develop habits of self-presentation that were inauthentic. Here, his critique was really of the court. He believed that the rules of civility and etiquette that governed the way that aristocrats in Europe dealt with one another forced them to lie about their true feelings, to be deceitful about what they really felt in order to observe these niceties. Rousseau emphasized that true virtue could be found with those who were least civilized. The cliché that emerged from this was the "noble savage." The American Indian was most often cited as someone who, because they were so close to nature, was somehow more authentic and less tainted by civilization.
In conclusion, let's just summarize these points. The confrontation with other peoples in other parts of the world prompted a series of reflections, first of all, about human nature. Did humans in other parts of the world share some essential personality, inspirations, and characteristics? Second, it prompted certain reflections about human history. Here they had assumed that there was a development of human civilization where Europeans had somehow arrived at a more advanced stage whereas other peoples in other parts of the world were somehow less developed and more primitive. Finally, the third reflection was whether or not this process of civilization development was a good thing or a bad thing. Although many Enlightenment philosophers believed in this notion of progress, others weren't so sure.