The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature

Today, as historians look at the enlightenment they look at it through the eyes of the great thinkers.“The philosophic spirit itself took refuge in the writings of some great men”(D’Alembert,7).They helped create knowledge in how it is viewed today. However, the question remians what is the category that these men fall into. There are many different names and definitions of what these men can be called and who qualifies to fit in this group. It is said that many of the men that were classified in the category were not actual philosopher thinkers that expanded the mind and challenged thought. In the essay “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature” by Robert Darnton he discuses the status of these philosophes that were being produced during the High Enlightenment. He argues that “the summit view of eighteenth-century intellectual history has been described so often and so well that it might be useful to strike out in a new direction, to try to get to the bottom of the Enlightenment, and try to penetrate into its underworld...from below”(Darnton,57). He decides to look at the status of the enlightenment thinkers during this time to see the social standing that they had and the influence upon the world around them, not from the overall philosophes. Not from their works that were produced or the social responses to them; from the actual men of letters themselves.Darnton criticizes other historians for having looked at the Enlightenment “only through the eyes of this elite and proposes that, instead, we examine it from the perspective of those who failed to break into this closed elite of ‘literary aristocrates’”(Who were the Philosophes, 44).

Darnton discusses, in his essay, the stance of the men of letters during the ...

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... impoverished. The members of Grub Street now needed the change that was happening in thought during the Early Enlightenment. “It would seem to be necessary, therefore, in looking for the connection between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, to examine the structure of the cultural world under the Old Regime, to descend from the heights of metaphysics and to enter Grub Street”(Darnton, 65). These ideas of the old Enlightenment were seeping down into the lower classes because of what was happening to the Men of Letters. These members needed a change. “[W]hile they grew fat in Voltaire’s church, the revolutionary spirit passed to the lean and hungry men of Grub Street, to the cultural pariahs who, through poverty and humiliation”(Darnton, 66). This is what was happening in France during the High Enlightenment that led down into the Revolution for further change.