Sir, - Could I reassure your correspondent Paul O'Hanrahan (August 9th) that students of the Enlightenment are not intent on keeping your readers in the dark? In my paper to the recent Enlightenment conference in Dublin, as outlined in the excellent report by Helen Meany (The Irish Times, July 28th), I did indeed argue that, for the most part, the Enlightenment preferred to remove pain and suffering as proper objects of political concern, relegating them to the clinic, to charity or to the new private domain of "sensibility". How else are we to interpret the indifference of advocates of "progress" to what were designated "doomed" cultures, or, indeed, the indifference of the economic rationality which presided over catastrophes such as famine?
As against this, one of the most distinctive contributions of Irish thinkers such as Swift and Burke was precisely to reinstate the injured body, and by extension oppressed cultures, into the Enlightenment. Hence Swift's famous assertion of the right "to roar on the rack", and Burke's preoccupation, in his aesthetic theory of "the sublime", with terror, pain and state executions (or what he referred to as "judicial murders").
There were others such as Voltaire (whom your correspondent correctly mentions), Diderot, Raynal, Adam Ferguson and Herder who drew attention to casualties of progress, but - regrettably - they were the exception rather than the rule. My point was simply to retrieve their muted voices, and give them the belated hearing they deserve. - Yours, etc.,
Luke Gibbons, Dublin City University, Dublin 9.