[noumenal]

??????????

[!@#$%!]

goddammit i lost what i was going to post.

i say mostly #2, but #1 has some truth to it so i voted in between

i was saying it's too fashionable among "post-modern theorists" (if you believe the oxymoron) to shit on the enlightment as the ideological bedrock of colonialism/imperialism/ etc. however they are full of shit, as we've had colonies and empires under the rule of superstition.

anyway i gotta go for a bit but i hope the discussion begins...

[noumenal]

Yeah, I was hoping this would turn into a nice sounding board for people to induldge in pseudo-intellectual wankering, as I often do.

I voted for #3. But I lean heavily towards #2. What made me think of this was reading a book called After Virtue by Alasdair C. MacIntyre. I grabbed it on the way to take a shit a little while ago and was skimming through it. I read it a few years ago in a philosophy class. MacIntyre is one of those that thinks the Enlightenment was a disaster. Interesting reading though.

[Grete]

I voted The beautiful awakening of the human race which led to our glorious maturation as a species. ...;-)

[Hip Priest]

Especially when one considers the political and social progress evident in the Seventeenth century, I think the Enlightenment saw if not a reversal then a stagnation of that progress. The self-aggrandisement of it's leaders as true vessels and dispersers of wisdom says it all: individual happiness, concerted joint progress, personal freedom and even entire histories and philosopies were dealt a blow from which some never recovered.

Without an 'ecumenical' (to borrow the term) concensus any absolutist philosophy is doomed to breed contemporary unease and retrospective scorn, although the Enlightenment recieves too little of the latter. Of course you will never get an ecumenical consensus to an absolutist philosophy , and for a very good reason - it will always deprive too many people of their freedoms. That is why absolutist philosophies fail, indeed the only way any absolutist philosophy (temporarily) holds sway is by encouraging prejudice and, ultimately, hatred.

In the final analysis, however, I think we should be wary of falling into the trap of holding the Enlightenment culpable for all collapse of morals, development of colonial attitudes etc, as we have had the ability to move to a more reasonable mindset all along. It's too easy to lay culpability for all subsequent wrongdoings on the misguided principles of the past.

[krastian]

Numero dos.

[saoq]

I lean toward #2. My objection is that it wasn't and still isn't beatiful. I think it's the single most dangerous venture - which is still underway,half-done - humans ever undertook. Building pyramids, crossing the desert or defending Troy are childish games compared to this.
Im. Kant, for whom I feel a great respect, defined Enlightmnt as "man's exit from his self-imposed immaturity (or childhood). Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another".

I hate postmodernists. I hate postmodernist essays, papers. I physically hate em. they remind me of alchemists or scripture-interpretators, constructing huge, hermetic, super-complex nothingness-es. A great thinker has neither the time nor the intention to write in a hermetic manner; he has better things to do.

[!@#$%!]

^^^awesome reply saoq!

the enlightenment gave us liberty and democracy, progressive political revolutions across the americas and france, revolutions in mathematics and science and the formalization of the scientific method, freedom from religious and superstitious rule, the metric system (i love it), the common coin of rationality in public discourse and politics, etc etc...

sure there were excesses: absolutist tendencies, rationalistic justifications of monarchies, positivism as a religion, the exclusion of non-western cultures, etc, but i see them as growing pains rather than evils that overwhelm the good. by comparison, what did romanticism give us? some great poetry, but also the plague of nationalism, which continues today, and many bloody wars that cascaded into the XX century.

i *do not* want to go back to the dark ages, thanks very much, and i think the baroque was a pretty awful period too, socially.. anyone tempted to think that we would be in a better world without the enlightenment needs only to think of life under the taliban or what would happen in the u.s. if christian fundamentalists came to power.

[truncated]

I think the Enlightenment is definitely subject to that plague of critical hindsight. As !@#$%! pointed out, of course it had its drawbacks, but those are inherent in any widespread societal movement. If you simply look at the prominent spearheads of the movement, their ideologies differed from one another, in ways that, contrary to colliding, merged to produce a universality that made the movement so effective.

You have Voltaire and Rousseau, for example - one hailing the aristocracy, one rebelling against it; one emphasizing intellect, the other emotion; one maintaining a grasp on traditional norms, the other advocating progress and innovation - and these ideals came together to form the basis for the Enlightenment, which I personally think did quite the opposite of hindering rational moral discourse. It simply attempted to stir logic and reason into a melting pot of stagnating societies built on custom, superstition, and the intangible, without destroying (and in fact enriching) their humanitarian foundations.

[qprogeny79]

2. undoubtedly 2.

consider the age that preceded the enlightenment. this was an age in which millions of people died simply due to lack of proper sanitation, an age when people would be burned at the stake for questioning the archaic dictates of an omnipotent religious monarch, an epoch where the proper means to knowledge was a profession of faith in an unknowable, intangible deity and any rational thinker had to operate within the confines of the tyranny of church and state by becoming a monk or religious philosopher. this was the feudal era when people were considered subservient to others merely by the circumstances of their birth, an age characterized and dominated by perpetual warfare, stagnation, and intolerance.

then one day someone spoke up and decided that the universe was knowable, that we could elevate ourselves out of the abyss we had been digging ourselves for well over a millennium -- and that all that needed to be done was to cast off the deadening doctrines of subservience to church, state, lord, and master and embrace reason, science, reality. we did, and the world hasn't been the same since.

when i first heard that handel's water music was written for an outdoor festival my disappointment was boundless. i could have sworn the work was written as a towering testament to the glory of the mind, an immense liberation of reason after 1000 years of exile.

long live the enlightenment. may its legacy last forever.

[noumenal]

This is great, but nobody's arguing for #1. Come out of the woodwork you guys, or I'll have to become the devil's advocate...

[Hip Priest]

I do feel that many of the advances would have been made anyway, that we are always learning and developing. I don't think the enlightenment encouraged development as much as channeled.

There was development before the Enlightenment, and much to be done afterwards. It had an effect, for good and bad, it was neither a panacea nor a plague.

[Everyneurotic]

you can't go against a movement that used art and expression as a spearhead.

yet, it seems people went overboard and tried to erase the past completely and deny it's virtues.

[Hip Priest]

One could say that art and expression were used as deceits, whilst a ploy was enacted of sneakily pushing a very limited agenda.

[Everyneurotic]

Originally Posted by Hip Priest

One could say that art and expression were used as deceits, whilst a ploy was enacted of sneakily pushing a very limited agenda.

yes, you could say that, but wouldn't you rather have that than war and brute force? plus, even if that was the generally accepted agreement, you still had the people who were in it for the art and expression and contributed tons to humanity.

like all things there's more than one side to the story, and both have negative and positive aspects

[Hip Priest]

Originally Posted by Everyneurotic

yes, you could say that, but wouldn't you rather have that than war and brute force?

As long as people are free, yes. But when people are oppressed, then what?

Originally Posted by Everyneurotic

plus, even if that was the generally accepted agreement, you still had the people who were in it for the art and expression and contributed tons to humanity.

I agree. But what if those same artists etc had been around anyway? And what if their artistic freedom had been greater, if they hadn't been chained by restraint to some limited ideological agenda? What works we should have had then, my friend, what works indeed!

Originally Posted by Everyneurotic

like all things there's more than one side to the story, and both have negative and positive aspects

Agreed.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

the enlightenment gave us liberty and democracy, progressive political revolutions across the americas and france, revolutions in mathematics and science and the formalization of the scientific method, freedom from religious and superstitious rule, the metric system (i love it), the common coin of rationality in public discourse and politics, etc etc...



bullshit. you people have to remember that you are comparing Europe to Europe when you praise the so-called Enlightenment. How were the Enlightened? Did they find Love? Empathy? Integrity? Deep Cultural Awareness? Spirituality? Intelligence? fuck no! Only Europe entered the Dark Ages, the rest of the world was thriving, expanding, evolving, in a truthful and uplifting way. It was only the Europeans who came to encourage racist expansion and true imperial colonialism. they were the ones who invented the "chosen people" myths, and it is the Enlightenment that directly supported this racist philosophy, always the driving force. dont let the so-called history books fool you, look at the reality of things, not the stories.

!@#$% it is indeed truth that the Enlightenment is the bedrock of racism and imperialistic colonialism. nothing good or truth came out. there is no such thing as democracy it is a fairy tale. We rasta deal with reality and we know the games behind the shitstem. it is all an illusion. the only truth is love, and no love came from the enlightenment, only slavery to the world, both mental and physical! Do you think it is coincidence that immediately following the so-called Enlightement was the beginning of modern warfare, and the first times that people came together to kill each other in their tens of thousands a day?

[Everyneurotic]

Originally Posted by Hip Priest

I agree. But what if those same artists etc had been around anyway? And what if their artistic freedom had been greater, if they hadn't been chained by restraint to some limited ideological agenda? What works we should have had then, my friend, what works indeed!

it's kinda like with bands, who gave a shit about slint before mogwai, tortoise, tristeza, gybe, etc. appeared?

the enlightment wasn't total, far from that, but it was a little door that led to something else. it really gets misunderstood and blown out of proportions and for all it's contributions, it ended up being a fad. the results and consequences of the enlightment happened in small aspects, where the impact was felt the most. sure it's bad that we can't really know never what would happened if a real, total enlightment happened; people weren't ready to absorb all, they took what they could and went from there.

the human race and civilization were very, very different back then.

and exactly what you said. "what works indeed"!!!

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

bullshit. you people have to remember that you are comparing Europe to Europe when you praise the so-called Enlightenment. How were the Enlightened? Did they find Love? Empathy? Integrity? Deep Cultural Awareness? Spirituality? Intelligence? fuck no! Only Europe entered the Dark Ages, the rest of the world was thriving, expanding, evolving, in a truthful and uplifting way. It was only the Europeans who came to encourage racist expansion and true imperial colonialism. they were the ones who invented the "chosen people" myths, and it is the Enlightenment that directly supported this racist philosophy, always the driving force. dont let the so-called history books fool you, look at the reality of things, not the stories.

well man you clearly have a point and i agree in part with it-- while europe was immersed in ignorance and pestilence, the muslim world was developing mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and the arts, and preserving the knowledge of antiquity (with the exception of the burning of the great library of alexandria-- what a shame).

the chosen people myth however stems from judaism & was kidnapped by christians.

the enlightenment was due in part to the absortion of these classical and muslim knowledge by way of the rennaissance. ***** averroes's work on aristotle for example. [edit sorry i put avicenna originally-- that was wrong]

however, racism was NOT an invention of the enlightenment. racism was an invention of the religious wars of the middle ages. the medieval impulses of the spanish reconquista not only expelled muslims and jews from spain but also forced those remaining ones to convert to christianity. from being a cradle of knowledge and science in the high middle ages, renaissance spain became a backwards theocracy, fostering the ideas of "purity of blood" agains "jewish contamination" and such other shit.

racism stems out of ignorance, not knowledge. and when reason was used to support racism it's because it was misused to rationalize ignorance. which brings me to my next point.

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

!@#$% it is indeed truth that the Enlightenment is the bedrock of racism and imperialistic colonialism. nothing good or truth came out. there is no such thing as democracy it is a fairy tale. We rasta deal with reality and we know the games behind the shitstem. it is all an illusion. the only truth is love, and no love came from the enlightenment, only slavery to the world, both mental and physical! Do you think it is coincidence that immediately following the so-called Enlightement was the beginning of modern warfare, and the first times that people came together to kill each other in their tens of thousands a day?

i would argue on the side of habermas (which i haven't properly read though) that the reason our world is still a fucked up one is because the enlightment project was left unfinished. the ideas of the enlightment are the tools we use to conquer our freedom-- in a european-ruled word, no doubt... that's a fact of history. but that's how--the chickens come home to roost, as malcom x used to say. the universal declaration of human rights is a product of the enlightenment. religious tolerance emerged during the enlightenment, as well as secularism. the transcendance of reason from... pure rationalism... is a product of the enlightenment as well. "sapere aude"--("dare to know")-- implies that knowledge is a work in progress, not a stagnant dogma. the liberation movements in south africa, india, and other countries, were in part based on local traditions but also in great part in the ideological heritage of the enlightment, which the european-educated natives absorbed (both mandela and gandhi got law degrees).

"liberte egalite fraternite" is still a work in progress (sorry french people but the accents are hard on my laptop).

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Pure Rationalism has existed since before Christ, as has religious tolerance, and especially secularism. These are old things, deeply imbedded in human society, but it is the very colonialist expansion that resulted from the so-called Enlightenment that came to hide and even destroy these concepts, with exploitation peaking in African Slavery and Nazism. The Enlightenment in its fullness, birthed the thinkers and philosophies that hold one race superior and another inferior. In fact, it is the Enlightenment that invented the European concept of Race and Ethnicity, that defines racism itself!

The South Africans, the Indians, the South and Central Americans, the Vietnamese, were not influenced by the Enlightement, they were reacting to the fucked up situation that the shitstem puts entire peoples into.

Until Europe is no longer the standard from which the world is judged, both in history and today, then the world will remain a fucked up place.