The Enlightenment and the Intellect
The theoretical physicist David Deutsch sees the Enlightenment as humanity learning to envision time as an open-ended movement toward progress, so long as we stay focused on improving our explanatory power and our understanding of how our intelligence works.
More than an interesting moment in political, cultural, and social history, the Enlightenment should be seen as a massive expansion in the speed, scope, and reach of intelligence.
Hc calls it ‘the beginning of infinity’.
Our Enlightenment legacy is embedded in our founding documents—the Declaration and the Constitution, both of which compose time not as a fulfillment of a preordained narrative, but as an open horizon of possibilities. They are documents that expand what intelligence can do. They model ways of behaving that seek ‘a more perfect Union’ without being able to say definitively what that perfection is or even that it is attainable once and for all.
Perfection is never achieved, but always pursued. The pursuit always exceeds its intentions, and consequences must be monitored and adjusted. We are always at the beginning of infinity.
We are now passing through a new acceleration of the Enlightenment’s expansion of intellect.
It is unclear if our liberal institutions can keep pace.
Time, Fate, and the Intellect
While Deutsch sees explanatory knowledge as the Enlightenment’s greatest legacy—and he is right to do so—I see something much more far reaching: the elongation of time.
No longer do we live in a world created by God in 4000 BCE. We live in a world composed of natural processes that have their own durations, their own trajectories, and their own indifferent powers over us—i.e., fate and necessity.
While seeking better explanations is the purpose of a relatively few professionals, living in elongated time is fundamental to nearly everyone’s consciousness. It is the water in which we swim. It had to happen in order for ‘better explanations’ to become the motor of history, and for the intellect to systematically take on the effort of overcoming fate.
Thomas Malthus was among the first to fully articulate the human condition as unfolding in time. He did so by making time calculable:
Taking the population of the world at any number, a thousand millions, for instance, the human species would increase in the ratio of —1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, &c. and subsistence as—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, &c. In two centuries and a quarter, the population would be to the means of subsistence as 512 to 10…
Seeing time as calculable was in part made possible by Enlightenment geologists such as Buffon and Hutton who simply could not reconcile what they were seeing in fossils and rock strata with a relatively young creation.
The Mosaic history [the Old Testament] places this beginning of man at no great distance…. But this is not the case with those inferior species of animals…. We find in natural history monuments [fossils] which prove that those animals had long existed; and we thus procure a method for the computation of a period of time extremely remote, though far from being precisely ascertained.
Darwin, influenced deeply by both Malthus and Enlightenment geology, could still marvel at the elongation of time as late as 1859:
We can best gain some idea of past time by knowing the agencies at work, and learning how deeply the surface of the land has been denuded, and how much sediment has been deposited. (The Origin of Species, 1859, Cambridge University Press, page 266)
That the long duration of past time is something that humanity still had ‘to gain some idea of’ in 1859 is an easily overlooked remark. But we are staring into a moment of humanity realizing something profoundly disturbing about itself and its place in the world but which we take for granted today—the earth’s age stretches well beyond 4000 BCE.
Time is beginning to appear infinitely extended.
We are accustomed to thinking that Darwin drained the Earth and human existence of inherent meaning. He did not. He gave the human condition a quite definitive meaning: we exist to survive because we are nothing more than one species among others.
‘Natural selection’ thus became the new Malthusian time trap: natural selection moves at a pace that humanity does not control. It is slow, plodding, driven by mistakes and experiments, and deeply indifferent to our desires and aspirations—which themselves are nothing but veiled expressions of a will to survive in a fundamentally competitive world.
Nature does the selection; we are merely along for the ride.
We may be only now emerging from this trap. It requires a return to the Enlightenment.
In the Beginning
We are always at the beginning of infinity: ‘Neither the human condition in particular nor our explanatory knowledge in general will ever be perfect. We shall always be at the beginning of infinity’ (65).
Intellect moves faster than nature by understanding it laws—its rhythms and tempos—and manipulates them. This is not just a change in how we experience time. It is a change in the way time works. Our intellect, in expanding its reach and its power, determines the trajectory of time—it takes over fate and makes it a wholly new dynamic—one that is a consequence of intellect, not an externally imposed limit.
To edit genes is not to merely speed up evolution. It is to take over the selection process itself. And in doing so, we take over time because we set the direction, the purposes, the outcomes, and the causal sequences.
We are in control of forces that we didn’t use to control. This is the consequence of our expanding intelligence—the capacity to turn fate into possibilities. The question becomes as we orient toward infinity, how can we master our mastery over necessity? If we are suddenly the authors of the future, then the ill consequences belong to us. Fate returns as a byproduct of our good intentions.