A Few Thoughts on the Enlightenment

I took a visit to the British Museum and spent a good amount of time in the Enlightenment room. There one will find all manner of objects and books relating to the earliest period of the Museum's history, along with placards explaining and describing the thinking and knowledge of the time. There are weighty tomes sealed behind glass, some of which appear as though they might crumble if improperly handled, along with various scientific instruments, orrerys and collected artefacts from around the world. It very clearly creates the impression of a collection, as if some wealthy child grown tired of postage stamps had set out and gobbled up whatever he could find to catch his interest from the furthest reaches of the globe. What follows are a few jumbled thoughts of mine on this habit of collecting and the need to organise.

During the Enlightenment there was a systematic and concerted effort to procure and to categorize artefacts from around the world. The notion that objects, animals, plants, art, and civilizations could all be neatly shelved, labelled and ranked, essentially put in a box, is both bold and arrogant. Yet it is hard to underestimate the progress of knowledge that this brought about. While philosophers sought to find proof of the writings of the Greeks and the Romans, or to fit their findings with an understanding of the natural history of the world derived from the Bible, their inquiries brought about a collision between data and theory. Without a collection of diverse animals from around the world and the attempts to organize them, an articulation of evolution would be impossible - it is a bird’s eye view that is obvious in hindsight but only made possible after the careful consideration of volumes of data. 

While early on there was a ranking of art and civilization, with the belief that there was a definite progression of civilization, the collection of more data and more careful scrutiny of the data led to the breakdown of this view as it became untenable to simply dismiss forms of art or neatly stack everything.

Many of the ideas of the enlightenment proved wrong - the thinking changed from the start of it - but the basic premise proved and remains invaluable: that of going out into the world, of finding and collecting, of accumulating data, and of trying to fit this data to the most seemingly simple or elegant model. The confrontation this provoked is of immeasurable value.

Of course you can’t divorce things from their context - there’s something very misguided about the whole idea of the museum - but in a real sense you can, provided you don’t forget where they belong. And the reorganization of things, even if it proves misguided, leads to the formation of new connections and the generation of new knowledge.