Aero's Hicks article, Part 3

Things get even worse when Hicks discusses the Enlightenment, which ironically seems to be the only period of Western philosophy for which he has any fondness.

Hicks argues that the characteristics of the Enlightenment include: metaphysical realism, epistemological concern with reason and experience, understanding the human being as a tabula rasa, ethical individualism, support for liberal capitalism, and so on. But this reads less like a list of characteristics shared by all Enlightenment thinkers, and more like a narrow summary of John Locke’s greatest hits. Of course John Locke is a seminal Enlightenment thinker, who argued that a human being was a tabula rasa and learned from experience, and who supported private property and individual rights. But Locke himself argued extensively against another Enlightenment author, Thomas Hobbes, who supported an absolute sovereign’s entitlement to trample individual and property rights if necessary. Similar problems emerge when you try to jam any other major Enlightenment thinker into Hicks’ list of characteristics. Descartes, whom Hicks praises, certainly did not believe that reason was largely drawn from experience. Indeed, Descartes’ entire skeptical argument was about how all experience of the external world might be illusory. Spinoza was not especially individualistic either: his Ethics is a manual on how to stoically accept that we are all a part of, and determined by, God. Even Adam Smith, the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, would have rejected the arguments that human beings are blank slates, and that it is an unquestionably good thing for all people to be individualistically self-interested.