03.31.06
Reply to a post: Enlightenment(s)
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 nihilism, 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.
Anyway, thanks for your posts. Welcome, but keep a lid on it. This isn’t the shouting match zone a la Talk.origins.
Stay tuned.
Perezoso said,
April 2, 2006 at 10:44 am
OK. I admit Im a bit too cynical and overly sensitive from arguing with postmodernists and marxists who have all been indoctrinated with the anti-Enlightenment, anti-analytical philosophy perspective.
That said, I find your use of Kant somewhat strange (I don’t think Hegelian dialectic should be taken seriously,really. except perhaps as some bizarre model). I am not a Kant scholar, but have read a good bit of the 1st Critique, and while I might agree that there are some grounds for a priori knowledge, Kant’s own argument for the synthetic a priori and other idealistic concepts are far from convincing. So if you mean Kant the philosopher somehow puts forth some valid idealist arguments which can be used to refute evolution or scientific materialism, or shall we say, the secular, empirical Enlightenment as a whole, I disagree.
I doubt you want to get into some metaphysics BS session, but I just don’t see much of Kant as some refutation of scientific materialism, or really of the earlier Lockean–Humean empiricism, though I will grant Kant’s discussions of space and time are interesting (and Kant is correct that empirical accounts of say mathematical knowledge are not very convincing); yet as Heisenberg noted after the Copenhagen experiments, Kantian insistence on the subjectivity of space and time was not at all confirmed by quantum physics, nor relevant–perhaps there are dissenters, but I have not as of yet read any.
That said, I will agree the Kantian synthetic a priori and categories may have relevance to evolutionary and science issues, but it would require a modern-day Kant to point them out. I am not some Skinnerian who denies intention or consciousness in toto, but consciousness and any Kantian categories, the ‘understanding,” are dependent on biochemical structure; the alternative–transcendence, immaterialism–is a far more troubling concept, tho’ I will grant it seems to have at least some intuitive force. (A few shots of tequila serves as a rather effective counterargument. to any claims of transcendence or Cogito-like ghost however)
(btw I am, when I have time, reading Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” mostly with approval.)