Between the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Enlightenment, Europe lived through an era known as the Age of Reason. This was a period which saw widespread advances in the arts and sciences. Artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Van Dyk flourished across the Continent. Likewise, scientists such as Newton, Huygens and Pascal continued the scientific revolution instigated during the Renaissance by Galileo. Philosophy advanced through rationalists such as Descartes and Spinoza, as well as empiricists such as John Locke, whose ideas would later play such a formative role in the American Constitution. At the same time, society began to investigate its own workings. Political theory took on a more profound aspect with the Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Ideas on economics emerged from such disparate figures as the maverick Englishman Sir William Petty and the French Mercantilists who advised Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, on how to run France.

Yet this was an age of unreason almost as much as it was an age of reason. The above accomplishments took place against a background of extreme political turbulence and irrational behaviour on a continental scale. These took the form of internal conflicts and international wars, as well as more localised manifestations such as outbreaks of ‘witchcraft’ and sadistic measures taken against the women deemed responsible. In just the length of a biblical lifetime – ‘threescore years and ten’ – the puritan Pilgrim Fathers who had emigrated to the New World in order to practice their religion in freedom underwent an outbreak of mass hysteria. The result was the notorious Salem witch trials. By now the ‘land of liberty’ was also beginning to participate in another form of unreason: the importation of slaves from Africa.

These were far from being the only major anomalies of the era, which might justifiably be called The Age of Reason and Unreason. Indeed, the Age of Reason itself was born in Europe at the same time as the greatest outbreak of mass violence yet witnessed on that continent. This was the Thirty Years’ War, a brutal conflict which would devastate central Europe to an extent that would not be seen until the two world wars some four centuries later. Yet out of this very same war came the Peace of Westphalia, a treaty which formulated the idea of the independent nation state, a concept which still remains a cornerstone of international politics to this day. The Thirty Years’ War was followed by the English Civil War, which was the beginning of the end for the Divine Right of Kings, at least in Britain. It was such turbulence that prompted Hobbes to write his Leviathan. Indeed, many of the greatest works and advances of the Age of Reason were to be inspired (or provoked) by the Unreason which gripped Europe.

In some cases, the leading figures themselves incorporated both aspects of this divided era. Perhaps none more so than the Italian artist Caravaggio, whose often violent scenes dramatically capture effects of light and darkness, both literal and metaphorical: a conflict which frequently flared in his own brawling life, during which he committed murder, and may even have been murdered himself.

This age also saw the development of European empires across the globe. The English and the Dutch East India Companies were pioneers of intercontinental trade with Asia, ousting the earlier Portuguese trader-explorers. In the process, these companies would develop financial instruments – shares and stockmarkets – which many regard as the beginnings of modern capitalism. The subtlety and ingenuity of these rational structures contrasts strongly with the grotesque barbarism exhibited by these same companies towards the indigenous populations of India and Indonesia. At the same time the beginnings of global commerce with the New World also witnessed the beginnings of the African slave trade. The fortunes generated by the sugar plantations of the Caribbean colonies, as well as the cotton plantations of the southern colonies of America, using the mass barbarism of slavery, would leave an indelible stain on the centuries to come. The fortunes thus generated would be used to finance the Industrial Revolution which began back in the homeland of Britain. From Britain, this revolution would spread to Europe, laying the foundations of the ‘free world’ as we know it today.

From Descartes is intended to illustrate such paradoxes, which were present right from the beginnings of our progressive era. Previous investigations of the Age of Reason have usually concentrated on the rational aspect and advances of this period. But what precisely is meant by the term reason? It was viewed then, much as it still is today, as a method of thought which progresses by logical steps towards a proven conclusion. Reason’s use of logic to establish a hitherto unknown certainty is perhaps best illustrated by its off-shoot mathematics. Here, the entire system is based upon a series of self-evident axioms, upon which all are agreed. Like Euclidean geometry this builds up, step by step, to create an edifice of such certainty and abstract beauty that it is viewed as one of humanity’s finest achievements. The rapture inspired by such a system is well expressed by the twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell:

                     At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as tutor. This was

one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not

imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that

moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and

my chief source of happiness.

Not until the turn of the twentieth century was this sublime aspect of reason replaced, at least to a certain extent. Only then did another off-shoot of philosophy, namely psychology, begin to discover that human reason was in reality based upon a far murkier world of instinctive impulses and dark irrational drives. Freud’s unconscious mind was but one manifestation of this not wholly scientific discovery of a world beyond reason.

It now becomes clear that this dark aspect too was part of the Age of Reason, from which our western progressive, liberal democratic world derives. And now this ‘free’ world is faced with the prospect of placing limits upon itself, simply in order for the world itself to survive our activities – which have led to climate change, pollution, and the general degradation of our planet. Given such circumstances, it is worth examining precisely how such ‘rational’ progress began. Can we learn from our rational origins – in both their sublime and their darker aspects? Can we discover from this founding myth how our rational world will be able to limit itself in order to preserve the very world we inhabit? Can the world which untrammelled progress has done so much to create, and at the same time destroy, survive itself?

In order to endure, such rational progress will inevitably be forced to ration itself. A telling pun. As some commentators have observed, not wholly with irony: If ever there was a time for communism to be invented, it is now! Does this mean that we must inevitably accept a command economy – socialism, no less? It is worth remembering that socialism – especially in its egalitarian aspect – was during the past centuries the great hope of so many enlightened thinkers. Before the dream soured, and the command economy degenerated into the command of dictatorship. But this would be a later development – a deviation from the original progressive idea which came into being during the Age of Reason, the era which would give birth to our western civilization. If this is to endure, what lessons are to be learned from the age of reason and unreason upon which our modern world is founded?