The Age of Enlightenment was a time in which many of the traditional philosophies and ethics, grounded in institutions like government and church, that affected human discourse were pushed aside and questioned by an influx of thought based on rationality, reason, and science. While this era is a big starting point for notions of inherent human agency/autonomy/individuality, it has not been without it’s critics/detractors. Inspection of much contemporary political theory shows criticisms of it’s nihilism in place of religious faith and it’s belief in the universal human reason over its respect/qualification of diversity; one of the definitions for the Enlightenment in the Oxford English Dictionary characterizes it as “shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority, etc.” However, these criticisms of both atheistic nihilism and pretentious intellectualism are challenged when reading the eponymous protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In his discovery of faith and purpose as a result of his autonomous decision to travel characterize him as a hybrid of traditionalist/Enlightenment thought.Crusoe’s duplicity of rebellion-induced-faith can be taken from the following statement from Elizabeth Einstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:
One might compare the effects of listening to a Gospel passage read from the pulpit with reading the same passage at home for oneself.In the first instance, the Word comes from a priest who is at a distance and on high; in the second it seems to come from a silent voice that is within . . . . I think that the ‘deep penetration of new controls’ to all departments of life becomes more explicable when we note that
printed books are more portable than pulpits, more numerous than priests, and the messages they contain are more easily internalized.
When attempting to characterize Crusoe as this hybrid of rebellious Enlightenment spirit and traditional values, first consideration must be of who/how Crusoe was before his life-altering time in isolation on the island. As Crusoe put it “having been… not bred to any trade, *his+ Head began to be fill’d very early with rambling Thoughts” (4). This serving as the launching point for his resilient desire to go to the sea rather than hold a more civilized, safer job such as law (5). Compound this desire for adventure over complacency with his disregards for the smooth ride of middle-class life (Upper Low Life, as his Father put it), and Crusoe in his pre-traveling days seems to epitomize that aimlessness of prior Enlightenment criticism.
However, it is important when calculating who Crusoe was before his formative experience on the island to also account for who and how he was in his time as a plantation owner in Brazil. While there, Crusoe leads a fast-rising life (“the happy View I had of being a rich and thriving Man in my new plantation”) that actually has him vaulting his neighbors in terms of prosperity. However, despite this success, he still possesses the nihilism and aimlessness of much Enlightenment critique; he displays a lack of morality or deep thought (29). When he is approached by three merchants/planters about embarking on a secret trip to Guinea to take “Negroes” on board, bring them home, and then have them work on their plantations (as a way around public slavery prohibition), Crusoe has no moments of consideration as to the ethics
or politics of this; all he thinks of is whether or not the choice makes fiscal/economical sense. In a way, his lack of a moral compass serves as the catalyst for his growth on the island, as here he agrees to go on this trek despite his plantation being well-off enough (“But I was born to be my own Destroyer”). In a sense, his consistent propensity to throw himself to danger facilitates his gaining of a grounding, as his life in England and Brazil are so effortless that he need not concern over much. In adventuring, and becoming shipwrecked, he brings himself to a condition in which everything requires calculation and interest.
Crusoe, in his time on the island, undergoes a vast change in consciousness; he finds religiosity. Following his sickness-inducedreligous vision, he reflects on himself:
“But a certain stupidty of Soul, without Desire of Good, or Conscience of Evil, had entirely overwhelm’d me, and I was all the most hardned, unthinking, wicked Creature among our common Sailors, can be supposed to be, not having the least Sense, either the Fear of God in Danger, or of Thankfulness to God in Deliverances.”
Thus, in his Enlightenment-esque self-interested desire to travel for the sake of travel, he brought himself to his own personal attachment to the traditional value of religion. This discovery becomes one that governs his moral compass (albeit, doesn’t make him a perfect person as his race relations still reflect ethnocentrism/hegemony) throughout the rest of the story: as his justification for not immediately killing the
cannibals, and his later apprehensions about travel (which again, he goes with still, and nearly kills him… again). Essentially, if I may conclude my analysis/characterization of Crusoe, it’s that he conveys a sense that a man attempting to claim/discover a new canvas of life away from society will inevitably bring with him that society. To go with the Einstein quote from before, he disregarded the “pulpits” of his Father, family, and society when in England, but when he was out on the island he discovered his own manifestation of their qualities, by economizing his life, finding religion, and by assuming property/ownership of the land.
