03.29.06
Enlightenment(s)
Madeleine Bunting wishes enlightenment on the enlightenment, Enlighten Me, comments at Crooked Timber and here.
This kind of amnesia about the enlightenment is getting a bit tiresome, but after the reign of postmodernism it is perhaps not surprising.
We have lost the ability, it seems, to defend a crucial turning point in history, and get distracted by debates over progress and rationality.
I can only recommend a close look at the eonic effect. There we see that the issue is the modern transition, which includes to total effect of the period of transition starting with the Reformation and leading to the Great Divide, i.e. the period the Enlightenment.
This transition, then, includes The Reformation, The Scientific Revolution, modern philosophy from Descarte to German Classical Philosophy, Hume, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of modern capitalism, the birth of democracy….
That’s a short list.
Does Madeleine Bunting wish this never happened, and prefer to let the status quo ante stand as superior? Yes or no?
Asking why Islam had no Reformation is an excellent question. Here again the question requires perception of the eonic effect.
It is important to understand the immense counterrevolution being attempted against this phase of history. So I think it important to recast the whole issue in a new updated form without the Eurocentric nonsense that has temporarily derailed the question.
In general, debates over rationality can be useless. Such quibbles. We see that the Enlightenment itself includes its own ‘dialectic’ here, and Kant’s ‘critique’ of reason is one of the seminal sources of the very opposition to the Enlightenment we see, as a sort of postmodern backwash.
These issues, then, are dwarfed by the transition factor, which includes a comprehensive, truly massive social transformation that rapidly began to globalize in the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment is just one small aspect of that total transformation.
Part of the problem is the narrow definition of the Enlightenment in terms of ‘reason’. But even this is a small universe of discourse, between the philosophes, Kant, Hegel, and many others. The Enlightenment as a periodized cultural totality inside the still greater totality of the modern transition is beyond definition, being a greater dialectical unity. Thus postmodernism is simply a leaf from the Enlightenment book, a moment in the progression started by figures such as Kant.
Enlighten me
Why are the ‘hard liberals’ so keen on invoking the Enlightenment as their tablets of stone?
Madeleine BuntingI need some help. I’ve been getting increasingly disturbed at the way in which the Enlightenment gets invoked by the self styled ‘hard liberals’ as if it amounts to their tablets of stone. Something didn’t seem to be adding up to me when they waxed lyrical about the Enlightenment legacy of rationality, secularism, belief in progress, the rule of law and the basis of all we know and love in western democracy and individual human rights.
Then I began bumping into the subject with Muslim intellectuals who were acutely aware of how this legacy was being used (implicitly or explicitly) against Islam. It was as if the debate had shifted from the Reformation - why hasn’t Islam had one? (it dawned on such questioners that a)the Christian Reformation led to several centuries of appalling bloodshed and b)there’s a good argument that Wahabi Islam is precisely Islam’s reformation) - to another tack: why hasn’t Islam had an Enlightenment?)
These Muslims then argue that the Enlightenment was a process of European definition in the face of the Ottoman Empire; it was shaped in opposition to Islam and hence has an inbuilt anti-Islamic bias. Montesquieu’s ‘Persian Letters’ is a good example of this.
Hence I was gripped by the exchange between two philosophers, Eric Bronner and Jonathan Ree at the Institute of Public Policy Research/New Humanist conference last week on faith and politics. Bronner kicked off the debate by arguing that the Enlightenment is at the heart of all democracy. It forms the basis of freedom and human rights, for example its views on torture. It argued that we temper our worst tendencies through reason. It was not against religion, but against fanaticism, and argued that religion should be kept in the private sphere. He cited Comte as accepting religion but within the bounds of reason (I’m not sure how Comte was going to square that). He concluded by saying we need to pick up the Enlightenment legacy and adapt it.
Ree countered by saying the Enlightenment had never happened - or at least certainly not in the shape we think it did. It was a retrospective creation in the nineteenth century designed to make the eighteenth century look silly - the gist was that excessive pride in human rationality was a story which had ended in tears in the brutal terror of the French Revolution. Ree pointed out that all the great thinkers attributed to the Enlightenment such as Hume, Locke, Kant were actually religious believers and none of them believed in progress.
The bit which most intrigues me is whether a new understanding about rationality emerged in the eighteenth century and if so, how was it then positioned vis a vis religious belief? Since then, we’ve had Freud, Foucault and Nietzsche - all of whom have contributed to the understanding that we are profoundly irrational and that rationality is a social construction - a way of reasoning which we believe to be objective, but never can be.
I’m no philosopher - hence the need for help - but I have a few questions: a) why do people think an understanding of rationality which is over 200 years old is useful now? As Ree said to Bronner why do we want to resurrect bits of our intellectual history?
And b) more generally, what is it about the Enlightenment that people are now taking it off the shelf to polish up and put forward as their political and intellectual credentials?
Perezoso said,
March 30, 2006 at 1:04 am
all the great thinkers attributed to the Enlightenment such as Hume, Locke, Kant were actually religious believers and none of them believed in progress
Hume certainly was not pious nor a believer in any real sense, though he may have supported the Church for pragmatic reasons; the Enquiry pretty much reduces Scripture to those few sections which are capable of withstanding rational criticism, doesn’t it? If that. Hume denies not only miracles but any arguments for a Deity, and any ideas of objective morality. I don’t understand how Hume is now being read as a theist.
Kant himself has a somewhat skeptical side (he affirms knowledge of phenomena is surer than that of noumena, for one–), and he was criticized by the Lutherans of the day; moreover, catholics certainly do not respect his system or his rejection of all the classical canonical arguments.
But the Enlightenment is also the French, is it not: the Encyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau. Diderot called for the death of kings and priests. They certainly were not religious in any real sense: Voltaire, who pretty much declared God was dead in what 1750, also was read by the yankees such as Franklin and Jefferson–Jefferson had a bust of Voltaire in his study.
Hegelianism probably had more of a causal relation to the disasters of the 20th century, both through fascism and communism. Don’t blame Voltaire or Hume or Jefferson, or even Darwin: blame Hegel and his bastard son Marx and distant cuz Nietzsche, and perhaps German industrialists . And maybe throw in Freud and phenomenology as well in the culprit file (thus Kant to some degree, the father of phenomenology).
Perezoso said,
March 30, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Like Bunting you don’t know crap about philosophy or the Enlightenment, really, Darwiniana. Start with like Verification.
nemo said,
March 31, 2006 at 6:21 pm
You are welcome to dissent here, but why don’t you refrain from scatological remarks. As soon as one gets outside the Darwin debate where mudslinging is the rule, we realize the silliness, and uproductive character of the Darwin debate. Why not purse the issue of the Enlightenment in proper fashion?
What I know about the enlightentenment might surprise you. I am not an Hegelian, and my critique of him is online. But the Popper-style bashing of him, in which I have indulged also, doesn’t manage to explicate him, so consider who the man was and his time. I mention him because any treatment of the Enlightenment could hardly exclude him, errors or not. To lump Marx and Hegel together and dump them for Hume shows your lineage of ‘English empricism’, perhaps, of the kind German Classical philosophy critiqued, etc…
Your remarks show that you wish to select a narrow interpretation of the Enlightenment as ‘the’ interpretation. It won’t work. The Enlightenment, which really begins in seventeenth century and includes an English, German, Scottish, American, and French version, in the main.
If we look at the eonic effect we see its place in world history, and are moved to ask, using the philosophy of history, the significance of its striking theme of freedom. Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment expresses this in terms of autonomy, in a critique of historical religions.
As the many reactionary forces start to gang up on the Enlightenment using the postmodern discourses it is helpful to take a broad view of the Enlightenment to see that its diversity, indeed its contradictions, get it strength. That was my point. There is a lot to say here, but I think that you seem to wish to redefine the Enlightenment via analytic philosophy or the reductionist scientism of the late nineteenth century, a common trap.
Anyway, thanks for your posts. Welcome, but keep a lid on it. This isn’t the shouting match zone a la Talk.origins.
Darwiniana » Reply to a post: Enlightenment(s) said,
March 31, 2006 at 6:33 pm
[…] Reply to comments You are welcome to dissent here, but why don’t you refrain from scatological remarks. As soon as one gets outside the Darwin debate where mudslinging is the rule, we realize the silliness, and uproductive character of that debate. Why not purse the issue of the Enlightenment in proper fashion? What I know about the enlightentenment might surprise you. I am not an Hegelian, and my critique of him is online. But the Popper-style bashing of him, in which I have indulged also, doesn’t manage to explicate him, so consider who the man was and his time. I mention him because any treatment of the Enlightenment could hardly exclude him, errors or not. His theme of Reason in history (along with Kant’s) is classic. We should at least be aware of it historically. The current science environment is producing Know-nothings, and the debate, for example, over Sam Harris’ book the End of Faith had no awareness that it was a rehash of that classic debate over Reason. To lump Marx and Hegel together and dump them for Hume shows your lineage of ‘English empricism’, perhaps, I won’t say nihilims, of the kind German Classical philosophy critiqued, etc… Then there was the Romantic Movement, same time, same places, …. Your remarks show that you wish to select a narrow interpretation of the Enlightenment as ‘the’ interpretation. It won’t work. The Enlightenment, which really begins in seventeenth century and includes an English, German, Scottish, American, and French version, in the main. It is a HUGE phenomenon, superbly balanced in its variety and depth. If we look at the eonic effect we see its place in world history, and are moved to ask, using the philosophy of history, the significance of its striking theme of freedom. Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment expresses this in terms of autonomy, in a critique of historical religions. We should learn how to settle our differences to defend the Enlightenment against the many who are trying to sink modernity in a ‘late fascist’ effect, e.g. many New Age gurus, reactionary sufis. They begrudge modenity its democracy, and the individual’s autonomy. So let’s not quibble over small issues, as we see the question of the Enlightenment as a global cultural resource, indeed one for the age of the Enlightenment. How would you explain the Enlightenment to a non-Westerner, confronted by the authoritarianism of his background, e.g. the Islamic world. As the many reactionary forces start to gang up on the Enlightenment using the postmodern discourses it is helpful to take a broad view of the Enlightenment to see that its diversity, indeed its contradictions, give it it strength. That was my point about ‘dialectical unity’, a term, I admit, that would be hard to define in positivistic terms. I could use another term. There is a lot to say here, but I think that you seem to wish to redefine the Enlightenment via analytic philosophy or the reductionist scientism of the late nineteenth century, a common trap. Many of these remarks apply to secularism also. The secular simply means that we have exited the authoritarianism of the medieval world. It doesn’t mean we are guaranteed that traditional religions will disappear. We should enforce the principle of the open society, and the pluralism of an immense religious heritage. There is no other solution short of fanaticism. In that context we should have been able to explicate the legacies of religious antiquity via reason. But that often fails due to the limitations of scientism. Precisely here Kant, please recall, was a great ally, and showed the way beyond those religions and their fanaticism. More on this later, perhaps. […]
Perezoso said,
April 1, 2006 at 10:01 am
Yes, the Enlightenment (E.) was a huge phenomena, and not easily reducible to a set of core concepts or figures; nonetheless, I think it can be formulated in analytical terms more or less, and that formulation would include the political as well as philosophical and scientific. And I would assert a writer such as Voltaire may be as important an E. person as the traditional philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, certainly in terms of his ideas’ effects..
Hegel obviously includes much, but, like most analytically-inclined people, I hold that what he includes is not merely a grand system of unverifiable metaphysics, but outright pernicious falsehoods; as one old professor of mine claimed, WWII might be viewed as the clash of the Hegelian right and left , and both of them are wrong, or something to that effect.
Any notion of Reason in history, of some impersonal “telos”, or of a transcendental dialectic seem about as close to truth as like hinduism . And the history of the 20th century shows what sort of progress characterizes the “Geist”, or the marxist version of it. The more empirical, secular aspect of the E.–from Locke and Hume to Voltaire, Rousseau , the encyclopedists, scientists, even a few decent Romantics such as Shelley, to Jefferson, the French republicans–that is the authentic, and viable tradition of the E. (tho’ with mistakes–like Rousseauian “freedom”), and unfairly criticized by all sorts of postmods and multiculturalists.