The trouble with the Enlightenment

Arguments about the Age of Reason have become stale. Can a new book transform the debate?

by Ollie Cussen / May 5, 2013 / Leave a comment
Published in May 2013 issue of Prospect Magazine

Like all good liberal intellectuals of the last century, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog spent a great deal of time agonising over the legacy of the Enlightenment. Cuckolded and divorced, Herzog seeks to make sense of himself, his country, and his century by writing unsent letters to philosophers and politicians, alive and dead. He laments the “liberal-bourgeois illusion of perfection, the poison of hope,” and demands that President Eisenhower “make it all clear to me in a few words.” Instead, he learns the brutal truth from his friend Sandor Himmelstein. “Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick,” Sandor tells Herzog. “You guys can’t answer your own questions… What good are these effing eggheads! It takes an ignorant bastard like me to fight liberal causes.”

In the last decade or so, defenders of the Enlightenment have shunned Herzog’s anxieties about liberal modernity in favour of Sandor’s belligerence. In the wake of 9/11 and the perceived threats of Islamic fundamentalism, a brotherhood of articulate, no-bullshit philosophes, led by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, dragged debates about the Enlightenment’s legacy out of the academy and into the public sphere. They traced all that was worth defending in the modern western world to the 18th century, when rationality, science, secularism and democracy took hold of the European mind.

Though they possessed an impressive capacity for tub-thumping alarmism, these modern freethinkers were by no means the first to mobilise the Enlightenment for their cause. The 18th-century philosophes such as Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert effectively volunteered their services to the debates of subsequent generations by presenting themselves as the vanguard of modernity. In 1784, Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as “humanity’s escape from self-imposed tutelage”; it was an intellectual revolution which allowed the human mind to fulfil its natural desire to think for itself, and from which social and political freedom would follow. In short, the Enlightenment presented itself as the dawn of modern self-consciousness, and as the beginning of reason’s slow but inexorable triumph over myth and obscurantism.

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Comments

Stephen Kennamer
May 7, 2013 at 05:36
I reckon just about all I need to know about the Enlightenment is that its opponents have been Hegel, Adorno, Derrida, and John Gray. When you make all the right enemies, you are probably doing something right. Pardon me if I side with the champions of rationality and empiricism, of the scientific method and deism, against the defenders of religious faith and the "traditional values" that had given Europe the ancien regime. Blaming the philosophers who practically introduced the notions of religious tolerance and secular democracy for totalitarianism, and the thinkers who touted rationality for the Holocaust, is an intellectual move worthy of the Enlightenment's opponents. "One major problem is that Pagden's cosmopolitanism rests on outright hostility to any religion." For some of us, that's not a problem at all, much less a major problem. Because most religion by its very nature is divisive, real cosmopolitanism cannot coexist with it. "He believes that as long as any "ethics of belief" still exists, the Enlightenment project will remain incomplete." He's right. This article finds religion to be a key element in any viable civilization. Well, whether he is right or wrong about that, perhaps he should remember that the Enlightenment led to the American experiment with the separation of church and state, so that this country officially tolerated all religions while favoring none. Does he have a problem with that? Then the author points out that many regions of the world want no part of the Enlightenment, so there! But arguing that no one will listen to the philosophes is not the same as proving that they were wrong. But as I read back over my submission, I admit that it bears out one of the article's points: the debate about the Enlightenment does promote a certain degree of belligerence.
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Bruce Lewis
May 7, 2013 at 07:35
Pagden is not so sophisticated, so cosmopolitan or so broadly educated as Mr. Cussen seems to think he is. Francois Rene de Chateaubriand opined long ago, in La Genie de Christianisme that the origin of the expanding sympathies and universalist solidarity that inspired the political revolutions of the Enlightenment period of European history was, paradoxically, in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Chateaubriand even believed that what Kant called "the cutting edge of VIRTUE in history" (the guillotine itself) was, ironically, the "whip" that Christ wielded against the money changers in the Temple.
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David Airth
May 7, 2013 at 14:03
To understand the Enlightenment and what it has given the world just look at where the Enlightenment didn't occur, chiefly in the Arab/Muslim world. The enlightenment virtues of secularism and pluralism are sorely lacking there.
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Sand
May 7, 2013 at 15:35
I am not a philosopher nor am particularly well read in that area but there are several points in the article I find most disturbing. Religion in general throughout many of these discussions lays claim to all morality of decency and humane behavior on the basis that its dogmatic literature is the word of its supreme creator and its command must be obeyed merely on that basis. It is not a matter of basic inherent human decency but absolute compliance with a force that cannot be disobeyed. That humans, similar to other social animals, retain inherent biological drives for compassionate behavior seems to be beyond their comprehension. That Hitler is produced as an example of the horror of not being religious verges on rather black humor since he claimed to be Catholic and subsequent to the Second World War it is on record that many German Nazis were aided in their escape to South America by Vatican officials. History has clearly indicated that the most brutal and inhumane behavior has been committed by people irrelevant as to their religion and many of the most repellant actions have had their source in religious doctrine. Because of the demand that religious people obey their dogma unquestioningly many problems have developed and the Enlightenment has, at minimum, encouraged worthwhile questioning of absolute conformity to doctrine whatever its source and the rise of technology, although not always a good thing, has, in general, lead to more human prosperity and innovative thought than total conformity to ancient belief would permit.
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Rob Crutchfield
May 7, 2013 at 15:39
The ideal of a universal community was already old in the 18th century; it was implicit in Christianity at least from its first few centuries (and maybe in Roman imperialist ideology), and is reflected both in the idea of the Holy Roman Empire and in perennial utopian religious communities. One thing that was new in the Enlightenment vision, I would say, is the belief that it could be achieved without universal submission, either to a common monarch or to a divinely ordained rule of life. Another new thing, as Ollie Cussen wisely observes, was incipient awareness of the shrinking of the world, focusing then on geography and communication, and subsequently on population, natural resources, and the environment.
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Al_de_Baran
May 7, 2013 at 16:10
"I reckon just about all I need to know about the Enlightenment is that its opponents have been Hegel, Adorno, Derrida, and John Gray". And I reckon I learn much about the Enlightenment's cheerleaders, if the best they can do is define the merits of the project negatively by those who critique it. "Pardon me if I side with the champions of rationality and empiricism, of the scientific method and deism, against the defenders of religious faith and the 'traditional values' [...]" Pardon the remainder of us if we refuse to accept such a false dichotomy, and such a simplistic and impoverished view of our choices. "But as I read back over my submission, I admit that it bears out one of the article’s points: the debate about the Enlightenment does promote a certain degree of belligerence". Translation: When even lightly prodded, the self-proclaimed apostles of sweet reason and tolerance become as nasty as those they oppose. The word for this is "hypocrisy".
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DrBrydon
May 7, 2013 at 18:13
"No society has ever existed without being accompanied by some form of religion or spirituality; this holds true today, even in the “disenchanted' west." "Never before" is a bad argument against never ever. We've seen to many 'never befores' fall by the wayside, as had many Enlightenment thinkers. This, indeed, is one of the major strands in Enlightenment thought; not to treat as sacrosanct that which is merely customary. Religion has always been a divisive force except when both religion and government are not free.
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FEDERICO M. GARZA MARTINEZ
May 7, 2013 at 21:18
In my Sandor like perspective, Enlightenment is no other than than the codification of a natural liberalism that evolved, and prospered, in certain places, after the Dark Ages. I just was refered to Bertrand Russel as stating that liberalism isno other thing than an attitude. There used to be a pre liberal Enlightenment in the Arab world of Al Andalus, though it was a tolerant semi-segregated coexistence, it was sort of an economic and religious laissez faire laissez passer. (segregation took place mostly at night, not much in daily life.) As a precedent to liberalism that later evolved in free cities. Religion was a private matter. (Yes I am aware of Progroms and Inquisition, I descend from those that suffered that.) Later western philosophers apropiated the ideas, as a response to Absolutism’s Dark Ages, became the owners of liberalism and Enlightenment. In order to make thing easy to understand, they ereased ownership of any good idea that was not Roman or Greek. Liberalism is praxis, simple principles. Natural. As communism is ideas, ideals. A fabrication. Now, back to fighting… Sandor Garza Monterrey, México
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Sean Matthews
May 7, 2013 at 22:51
You know, Prospect magazine looks more and more like a sort of english version of the New Criterion each time I look at it, or even (god forbid - so to speak) First Things.
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Nathan Zebrowski
May 7, 2013 at 23:13
There is much to admire in "Sandor Garza"s contribution. A modest Hegelianism lurks there: liberalism is a practice that people pursue because it satisfies certain social desires that develop organically out of certain conditions. Philosophical liberalism is a reflection on this development and this practice and not an a priori justification of it or a system of rules for creating it where the conditions do not exist. Religion is also, for Hegel, in part, a kind of practice, but it out-develops itself into a kind of theological philosophy, where it is uprooted from its generative conditions, and where it loses its specifically religious ground. As a practice and as a higher poetry, though (or, as Les Murray would put it, a large poem in loving repetition, inexhaustible), religion has its own place--not governing societies, but, as Sandor Garza almost puts it, restoring our souls at night. There are worse ways to see things.
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RS
May 8, 2013 at 03:13
Someone explain to me how Pagden's position is different from any of the 'New Atheists'. It's the same crude argument, but in a historical garb.
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Misha Van De Veire
May 8, 2013 at 09:09
This article started out well but I cannot say the same for the work as a whole. Cussen states: “One major problem is that Pagden’s cosmopolitanism rests on outright hostility to any religion.” And “This is a peculiar attempt to prove that the Enlightenment is all that stands between the west and Islamist despotism.” First, Enlightenment atheists, deists, and secular humanists were in complete accord about the need to reject theocracy and theism as both immature and dangerous. They advocated the position that man’s hatreds and cruelties toward one another were human failings which could be overcome through reason and education and natural moral empathy and were not the result of man’s “fallen nature” or the influence of evil spirits. They were hostile to religion only to the degree it claimed to have a God-given, exclusive right to control the behavior of everyone in society. His last statement is incomplete and lacks comprehensiveness. Enlightenment reason and empathy (the best aspects of the American experiment in a secular constitution) is what stands against—is the only societal alternative to Islamist theocracy and Catholic theocracy and Hindu theocracy. Was Cussen trying to or going to claim that religion is a force for good in the world? The degree to which religions advocate their Golden Rule philosophies over their authoritarian, exclusivist, anti-feminine, anti-gay, anti-birth control rules is the degree to which they enjoy the liberty of living in an Enlightenment secular society and having their religion both ways. Give the religious despots and fanatics the power they once had, and apologists and communitarians like Tony Blair and Tariq Ramadan would eventually face the same situation Galileo faced: recant or be broken on the rack. The Enlightenment and its offspring, Romanticism, surely deserve the major credit in freeing the human capacity to love nature for its own sake from theocratic eschatology and the view that the natural world stands in the way of the soul’s entrance into heaven. Science guided by Enlightenment wisdom is the only hope for mankind. One final comment: Cussen is critical of “the strident rationalism of Hitchens.” Why did Cussen miss the humor, the fine parsing of the various positions religion offers and their implications, and especially the clarity of a literary approach to the claims of theistic religion and their consequences? Cussen drags us into dichotomies which others have dissipated with tact, generosity, humor, and intellectual discipline. Read Pagden for yourself, and Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennett. Above all watch their lectures and panel discussions on Youtube and share in the joy of being human!
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.tony in san diego
May 8, 2013 at 15:27
" ...with Christianity no longer pulling the intellectual strings, what was to stop humanity from lapsing into self-centredness, cruelty and conflict? What the heck are you talking about? Are you contrasting the scary self-centredness, cruelty and conflict of the Enlightenment with the altruism, kindness and consensus of the prior thousand years?
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Ken Emmond
May 8, 2013 at 19:08
Cussen mentions the thought experiment of what might have happened in Europe had the Ottoman Empire prevailed over the Christians. If there remains any doubt about that, try this thought experiment: what kind of Europe would have resulted had the Reformation failed? The dogmantism that rejected Galileo would have ensured that the efforts at scientific advancements would have been stillborn. The Crusades might have been revived, though without the strategic advantages of technological superiority. To this day the Catholic Church places its own law above the laws of nations (viz. what is happening in the priest-pedophile scandals.) While the Catholic Church has many humanitarian achievements to boast about at the level of the priest and the humble adherents, at the institutional level it's hard to imagine that it's much of an improvement over Sharía law. Cussen's religious point is indeed well taken.
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Chris Schorah
May 9, 2013 at 17:23
Not many Enlightenment philosophers and historians or Pagden or even Ollie Cussen seem aware that the idea that man should be friends with man and develop a common humanity/cosmopolitanism originated, not with the Enlightenment, but with Jesus. Indeed, the sacrificial level that He called us to in loving neighbour and stranger arguably went far beyond Enlightenment thought. Yet Jesus also said to love God first. The problem was, and still is, the Godless Enlightenment ditched this first commandment, as had Christendom before it where the state had taken the trappings of Christianity without bowing the knee to Jesus and effectively secularised the Church. It was a pity that the Enlightenment thinkers didn’t realise that it was the corruption of Christianity that they needed to ditch, not God. Without Him in our lives we simply don’t have the gifts or inclination to be able to achieve what Pagden wishes. There’s no real redemtion from ourselves or effective restoration to what we were meant to be as the failures of Christendom and the after shocks of the Enlightenment have plainly shown.
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FEDERICO M. GARZA MARTINEZ
May 11, 2013 at 00:58
Consider the Phoenicians, Nathan, Was not the ways of the Phoenicians a pretty ancient liberal way of life and coexistence? That was thousands of years ago, even before any known philosopher existed. Are you not familiar with the ways of another great practitioners of liberal like life, of virtuous circles (or feed back loops), brilliantly described in Avner Greif’s work about those other magnificent merchants in the Mediterranean sea: the Genoese in XIth century. There are some things that do not require much of creators, they virtuously and naturally evolve. (Would that be evolutionary sociology?) Phlebas Garza p.s. thank g.. Phoenician and a little Genoese blood runs through my blood; sorry I am not that well read much less a philosopher, never cared about Hegel or many others in my limited, hedgehoed reading (an engineer by day).
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M Faraone
May 18, 2013 at 02:32
Is Pagden aware that Dante Alighieri wrote a book of political philosophy called Monarchy, in which he argued for a world empire as the only means to further world peace and the concept of humanity, the idea being that without seperate nations there will be no war. Yes, the same 13th Century Dante who wrote the Divine Comedy. How does that fit Pagden's theses that human sympathy and cosmopolitanism did not arrive until the 18th Century Philosophes. Pagden sounds like a propagandist, not a serious thinker.
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Anthony St. John
May 18, 2013 at 10:22
18 May MMXIII Now I'm really convinced that Western Civilization I (Europe) and Western Civilization II (DisUnited States of North America) are in via d'estinzione! Imagine Ollie Cussen trying to find an academic job in Europe! Boy, would he be "enlightened!!!" Anthony St. John The Italianist and No-bullshit Philosophé Calenzano, Italia
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FEDERICO M. GARZA MARTINEZ
May 18, 2013 at 19:04
To: M Faraone Pagden sounds like the propagandist of the greatest propagandists of all time: the French. As being represented like virtual monopolists of Enlightenmetness and even originators of liberal thinking and behaviour. They have always been great for inspirational pourposes but the French hardly are for any practical pourposes. Did not the French Enlightenmet lead to Napoleon (hardly a humanist) and Napoleon lead to ...? Sandor
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UVP
May 19, 2013 at 19:05
Christopher Hitchens wrote a column once in which he vigorously defended right-wing US journalist Robert Novak. He was defending Novak against charges that he had knowingly exposed a working undercover CIA agent as a way of trying to undermine her husband's whistle-blowing on the Bush Administration. In doing so Hitchens pushed a talking point circulating then on the right, which was to claim that Novak couldn't have exposed her, because he read her name in "Who's Who in America". All it takes is ten seconds reflection to realize how comically absurd this particular "defense" of Novak was, since to swallow it you have to believe that "Who's Who in America" listed her as "Valerie Wilson, née Plame, CIA Agent". There are many more examples of ridiculous pronouncements by Hitchens, but this is perhaps the best. Christopher Hitchens being compared to Volataire and Kant? Please. Hitchens wasn't even very bright for a journalist, and that's saying something.
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Victor
May 20, 2013 at 23:05
Cussen rightly identifies the tendency of successive generations of “progressive” thinkers to retrospectively re-cast the Enlightenment in the light of their own eras’ concerns. Even so, there’s something particularly piquant about today’s stock of engagé atheists adorning themselves in Enlightenment periwigs. True, there were a few thorough-going scientific materialists wafting through the salons of the Ancien Regime. But most intellectuals of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were either Deists or cleaved (qua the politically bold but philosophically cautious John Locke ) to an accommodation between Deism and traditional Theism. Central to Deist cosmology was a view of Nature as static, beneficent, rational and, for these reasons, normative. It was a view virtually identical to those of current day believers in “Intelligent Design”. There was room in this vision for the “noble savage” but not for the pterodactyl. For the men and women of the Enlightenment, the universe was a moral order, purposefully constituted by a higher being. Thus, the search for truth about the physical world was also a search for the sources of ethical obligation and for rational and (hence) moral rules of conduct. Perhaps their approach was not wholly unlike those of their theistic precursors and contemporaries, albeit that a key difference was the Deists’ rejection of revelation and of miracles and the downgrading of a priori reasoning, in favour of empirical observation. But what, philosophically, remained of Deism, once Hume had revealed the limits of empirical perception and what remained of the vision of a morally normative universe after Darwin? And, if the universe is not morally normative, from whence should we derive our moral norms? Much subsequent philosophy, particularly in the non-English speaking world, is an attempt to cope with the conundrum of ethical obligation, in the absence of both traditional religious imperatives and the morally normative Enlightenment concept of Nature. For the poster identified as “Sand”, however, this conundrum seems not to exist. Like other social animals, Sand writes, we humans retain “inherent biological drives for compassionate behaviour”. And so we do. But we also retain inherent drives that are far less compassionate. Why should one set of drives be considered normative and not the other? Even if we are justified in deriving an “ought” from an “is”, by what authority do we cherry pick? And whilst addressing Sand’s contribution to this thread, I note that he repeats that increasingly popular old saw about Hitler being a Catholic. This is a misunderstanding that verges on absurdity. Hitler was not a systematic thinker and, for opportunistic political reasons, avoided formally renouncing the faith of his ancestors (then, as now, Germans were required to register their religious affiliations for tax and other administrative purposes). But Mein Kampf and Hitler’s “Table Talk” clearly reveal an antipathy to traditional Christian values and teaching. For the Nazis, Christianity was a Semitic slave religion imposed on Aryan Germans by their supposed Jewish despoilers, in an attempt to sap the strength of the Herrenvolk . Why else, to adopt the Nazis own malign logic, would Christianity have posited the doctrine of the equality of all believers when science clearly showed humans to be inherently unequal both as individuals and as races? In other words, Nazism was (amongst many other things) a product of the Darwinian age, albeit that its Darwinism was of a vulgar, bowdlerised form. And, by the same logic that it rejected traditional religious ethical sanctions, it also rejected Enlightenment humanism, with the added consideration that the Enlightenment had been foisted on Germany by French cultural and military imperialism. Rather more curious is the contribution to this thread of poster Ken Emond, who seems to suggest that, without the Protestant Reformation, the Crusades might have resumed, but would have failed, due to Ottoman technological superiority. I’ve got news for Ken! Despite the Reformation and for good or ill, the Crusades did in fact resume and the largely Catholic armies of Austria, Poland and Bavaria proved more than a match for the Ottomans before the walls of Vienna and during the subsequent reconquest of Hungary. Ken also asks us to ponder the fate of Gallileo and suggests that, without the Reformation, most scientific advance may have been crushed by the Church. Counter-factual history is, of course, a dangerous (if highly enjoyable) game. But it’s at least as possible that, without the threat to its authority from Protestantism, the Vatican might not have felt the need to come down so heavily on Gallileo. We can but conjecture. What, meanwhile, are we to make of the claim that the Enlightenment invented cosmopolitanism? I’ve not yet read Pagden and don’t want to make unwarranted assumptions about his argument. However, as a number of other posters have pointed out, cosmopolitanism was inherent in Medieval Christianity. Indeed, what were the great trans-European monastic orders, if not exemplars of cosmopolitanism? And what, moreover, is Islam if not a cosmopolitan faith and civilization? In partial contrast, it could be pointed out that the Enlightenment was contemporaneous with the development of modern nation states, the rulers of which (despots as well as democrats) sought to harness at least some Enlightenment values to the process of state formation and, in the case of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, to national aggrandisement. An interesting and thought-provoking article, though.
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Victor
May 21, 2013 at 08:29
Sand I can't quite work out what your latest post has to do with my immediately previous one. But I do hope that it's many years before you have your cup of cosmic coffee.
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Stephen Kennamer
May 21, 2013 at 18:00
It's clearly late in the game and Victor, Sand, and I may be the only players left. I would like to make a brief contribution here to harmonizing my two colleagues, who seem to agree about much more than they disagree. Sand mentioned Hitler's nominal Catholicism only for the pleasure of smacking down religion in general; Victor seems to view religion in pretty much the same skeptical light. Victor is correct that Hitler's Catholicism was pro forma and merely politic; and some among the party intellectuals dreamed of an Aryan religion that would supersede Christianity. But a majority of the German soldiers and functionaries who "followed orders" were church-going Christians; they felt no shiver of contradiction when they "did their duty" and administered the Holocaust. Hitler, often shrewd about these matters, chose not to make trouble for himself by butting heads with the Catholic and Lutheran religions, precisely because the average German continued to be a believer. He preferred to co-opt and Nazify the churches, which proved rather easy to do. Sand, I assume, would point to this fact, and to the Vatican's obscene silence on the subject of rampant European anti-Semitism that was mostly religious in nature and essentially still a matter of Papal doctrine, to support his basic argument. I am accustomed to the argument often found among self-styled intellectuals like John Gray that both Nazism and Bolshevism show what happens when we abandon religion. It is useful, therefore, to remind ourselves that the Nazi state was in fact never officially atheistic. But it would be more useful, in my opinion, to understand committed Marxism to be, like committed Freudianism, itself a religion. And I don't mean a "secular religion," I mean religion in the unqualified sense. Both propound final answers to all questions about the meaning and purpose of life and how it should be lived day-to-day, and both involve metaphysical propositions as fuzzy and unprovable as the existence of God. As Simone Weil said, it was great fun to ask a communist the meaning of "dialectical materialism" and watch him squirm. Committed Nazism may be a borderline case, being the least metaphysical of the three isms, but Rudolf Hoess could move comfortably from Catholicism to Nazism without missing a step: his personality craved a dogma back by an authoritarian structure that gave him certitude and all the answers, and one was as good as the other. The philosopher Susan Neiman has written an entire book corroborating Victor's view of Enlightenment deism. But she would not agree that the faith of the philosophes was shaken by Hume so much as by the Lisbon earthquake, which she compares to the Holocaust in terms of undermining people's faith in God's moral order. The clockwork deity could perhaps be acquitted of human evil by means of all the traditional theological dodges, but why would He have set in motion a natural order that could wipe out indiscriminately the just and the unjust? If Enlightenment deists did not resemble modern atheists and secular humanists, nonetheless they called for science, reason, and, of utmost importance, the separation of church and state and an end to the clerical infamy. In my view, the attempt to blame the Enlightenment for all utopian and totalitarian excesses beginning with the French Revolution is over the moon. What a Marxist "struggle session," with its personal confessions of revisionist and counterrevolutionary sins, most resembles is a Puritan congregation on Sunday morning. Modern totalitarian states resemble Calvin's Geneva much more than Voltaire's idea of a rational polity. Here's John Gray pinning terrorism on the Enlightenment: "Right-thinking French philosophes campaigned for the prohibition of torture, but their ideas also gave birth to the Jacobin Terror that followed the French revolution." Oh, those culpable philosophes! They campaigned for the prohibition of torture, but they are responsible for it anyway, because people who called themselves followers of the Enlightenment reinstated it. You can't put one over on John Gray. However we might work out the small distance remaining between Sand and Victor, trying to figure out to what extent the Darwinian genetic basis for affiliative behavior can be augmented by our human adoption of a more expansive morality, we will owe almost nothing to the Calvinists who as gladly tortured and executed the social misfits as any modern totalitarian regime and almost everything to the Enlightenment thinkers who opposed them.
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FEDERICO M. GARZA MARTINEZ
May 22, 2013 at 01:07
Yet lot of people enjoy trying to impose their's or their group's ethics of beleif on others, something I like to call SADOMORALISM. I realy admire the use of pro forma in that context. Perhaps deism is the ultimate way to pro forma beleive in the existance of a god. In a non comitting to a religion way. And quite convinient too, as it fills all the voids in reach of reason and knoweledge. A creator as the ultimate phlogiston.
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James Schmidt
June 12, 2013 at 18:38
I've just posted a discussion of Pagden's book on my blog (http://persistentenlightenment.wordpress.com) that picks some nits with his handling of Voltaire (among other things, he confuses who loses a buttock and who doesn't) and his critique of Alasdair MacIntyre (who I think is an abler critic than Pagden suggests). Still, I think the book is, on the whole, a rather impressive achievement, especially in the way that it explores the relevance of modern natural rights theories for what Pagden terms the Enlightenment's "science of man."
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Philip Grant
June 15, 2013 at 01:47
Pagden brings out very well how the enlightenment's central concern was the emerging cosmopolis rather than sectarianism, nationalism and imperialism. This view is itself a 'religion,' in the classical sense (from the Latin 'religere')-- that which joins rather divides humanity and nature. The eighteenth century term for asserting the essential unity of all things is the very 'fraternity' preached but not practiced by most contemporary belief systems we call religious. Today fraternity would probably be called compassion. The enlightenment's connection of freedom and equality through the moral energy of compassion is a call for all of us not to eliminate differences but rather transcend attachment to the sense of separateness lying at the root of most of the violence plaguing us today. It forms the basis of civility and civilization. Rather than advancing a 'static' vision of the universe, the enlightenment sought to restore the concept of energy as operative in every sphere of life from the moral through the intellectual to the physical. As Pagden well says, enlightenment still matters to the 'party of humanity' in every age.
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John
July 3, 2013 at 09:19
Please find an essay which begins with a description of the structure of Light and whch is very much about a philosophy that begins from the perspective of having actually Realized En-lighten-ment with a capital E. http://www.dabase.org/Reality_Itself_Is_Not_In_The_Middle.htm
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Samrat X
January 6, 2014 at 10:34
There are other ways of thinking about our selves and the world. A few people in a largish continent named Asia have also had brains in their heads. But of course, if it's not from the West, it isn't philosophy at all.
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LoydBrandon
February 13, 2014 at 15:44
Grooveshark responded that the pre-1972 recordings sat within the safe harbor of section 512(c) of the DMCA, but UMG argued that the DMCA could not apply to the pre-1972 recordings because that would conflict with s.301(c) of the Copyright Act that nothing in the Act would “annul” or “limit” the common-law copyright protections attendant to any sound recordings fixed before 15 February 1972
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Confabulatory
May 19, 2014 at 01:57
Greetings. Could you please parse the following sentence for us in plain English? "For whatever reason, the nuancing, problematising conclusions of historians have failed to break the centuries-old Kantian-Hegelian lines across which philosophers, theorists and journalists trade ideological artillery." I'm sure you find such prose clever, as do those who pretend to understand it. But for the rest of us dullards clarity over clever tends to carry a bit more weight. It also surprisingly goes a long way toward effectively communicating the points you presumably wish to communicate. If this is what we can expect from contemporary Enlightenment scholarship, it looks as if you've already identified the source of your proposed enigma. Or did you have something more grandiose in mind?
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Mark C
March 6, 2015 at 07:18
Maybe enlightenment begins by asking questions and finding answers are an evolving creative path.
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