Dark Brilliance. The Age of Reason from Descartes to Peter the Great: reason and unreason (2024)

Dark Brilliance: The Age of Reason from Descartes to Peter the Great

Author: Paul Strathern

ISBN-13: 978-1838958558

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Guideline Price: £25

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Beneath the brilliance of the Age of Reason’s intellectual achievements in the sciences, philosophy, economics and the arts lay a dark underbelly of conflict, fanaticism, hysteria and human bondage. Such contradictions are relevant for today, according to Paul Strathern, because economic rationalism has caused a global climate crisis.

As an author of popular histories and a series of introductions to key philosophers, Strathern is an able and informative guide to the intellectual high points of the 1600s, with lively chapters on influential thinkers such as Spinoza, Locke, Hobbes and Newton. Of note is his talent for explaining complex ideas and relating them to future and past scientific developments.

His enthusiasm for scientific innovation is boundless. The reputation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz probably never recovered after Voltaire’s Candide satirised his optimistic philosophy according to which ours is “the best of all possible worlds”, but Strathern gamely defends the German polymath’s rational approach as well as his contributions to mathematics which included the invention of calculus (before Newton).

Thematic and historical chapters detail the lives of lesser luminaries (such as William Petty, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle), presenting the standard western European narrative of our modernity (progress through innovation). However, we learn that in parallel many of these men of science continued to dabble in the imaginary art of alchemy. The argument is clear: reason and unreason were entwined in the intellectual culture of this age. The rational mind sometimes gave way to the authority of tradition.

Britain and the Dutch Republic are key states in Strathern’s account of the Age of Reason. Both nations were central to the establishment of “capitalism as we know it today” through the development of monopoly trading companies. The first Stock Exchange opened in Amsterdam in 1611 to allow the trading of shares in the Dutch East India Company. Soon the markets extended beyond these shares to include all manner of commodities.

Speculation on the price of tulip bulbs by Dutch nobles, artisans and chimney sweeps led to the first financial bubble. The Tulipmania bubble burst, as they all do. Strathern asserts that: “Financial bubbles are thus a heritage from the Age of Reason, exhibiting the unreason which also characterised this age.” But we’re left wondering at what point stock markets stop being the result of reason and enter the realm of unreason. The concepts of reason and unreason are applied too loosely at times to be a useful framework.

There are many background references to the transatlantic slave trade and a recognition that the large profits from this trade would transform northern Europe “from a largely rural medieval economy into the beginnings of the modern era”. For Strathern, European economic successes built on the back of slavery are “paradoxes”. Slavery is “the dark underside” of the Age of Reason. But slavery was not the result of a conflict between reason and unreason. It was rather an integral part of the rational capitalist system of early global trade.

By insisting on a false opposition between reason and unreason, these concepts are transformed into moral value judgments when applied to the economics of markets and slavery.

The arts feature heavily in this work. Strathern highlights the picaresque of the Spanish and Dutch Golden Ages, luxuriating in anecdotes that bring human drama to canonical figures such as Velázquez, El Greco, Rubens and Rembrandt. He wants us to marvel at the exotic past, with its tales of catastrophe and tomfoolery, both general and individual.

Like the canvases of Caravaggio described so vividly here, the play of light and dark brings life to Strathern’s tableau, but binary oppositions tend to simplify rather than clarify the historical perspective. In his discussions of these artists and their great works, the terms reason and unreason seem to lose all meaning. They become just words, applied at will to well-known paintings.

Caravaggio is said to have painted “with the clarity of reason” with no convincing account of what that means. The works of Velázquez show “clarity and reason”. The discussion of Vermeer (whose works exude “calm reason”) reveals Strathern’s attitude to the purpose of an artwork: “An object of contemplative insight, where we come to our own conclusions.” But such subjectivity does little to help us appreciate the entanglement of reason and unreason that supposedly characterises both the Age of Reason and our own.

In an epilogue, Strathern returns to the lessons we should learn for today’s climate crisis. It reveals (as suspected) that all the talk of art was just for colour. If we wish to continue the economic progress that emerged from the Age of Reason (and Strathern does) we must embrace science and lean into ... nuclear fusion! By this rational logic, we have a great past ahead of us. The Age of Reason and Unreason will live on.

• James Hanrahan is associate professor of French studies at Trinity College Dublin