7. The Enlightenment. The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I

Transcription

1 7. The Enlightenment. An age of optimism, i an age of reason. The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. Thomas Paine, author of The Age of Reason

2 Modernity : The Enlightenment Foundations of the Modern World View And so between the 15 th and 17 th centuries, the West saw the emergence of a newly self-conscious and autonomous human being curious about the world, confident in his own judgments, sceptical of orthodoxies, rebellious against authority, responsible for his own beliefs and actions, enamoured of the classical past but even more committed to a greater future, proud of his humanity, conscious of his distinctness i from nature, aware of his artistic powers as individual creator, assured of his intellectual capacity to comprehend and control nature and altogether less dependent on an omnipotent God. Tarnas, p. 282.

3 Revolution and Reason [audio] [text] The Enlightenment is mankind s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one s own understanding without the guidance of another -Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant From the Renaissance onward, modern culture evolved and left behind the ancient and medieval world views as primitive, superstitious, childish, unscientific, and oppressive [ ]The application of systematic critical thought to society could not but suggest the need for reform of that society, and as modern reason brought to nature a scientific revolution, so would it bring to society a political revolution. -Tarnas, pp

4 Birth of the Critical Emancipatory Project No God can bring it about for us; man must rather become his own deliverer and in the ethical sense his own creator. Society heretofore has inflicted the deepest wounds on mankind; yet it is society too which through a transformation and reformation can and should heal these wounds. -Jean Jacques Rousseau cited in Crocker According to Montesquieu: The whole eighteenth century is permeated by [the] conviction, namely, that in the history of humanity the time had now arrived to deprive nature of its carefully guarded secret, to leave it no longer in the dark to be marveled at as an incomprehensible mystery but to bring it under the bright light of reason and analyze it with all its fundamental forces. To do this however, it was above all necessary to sever the bond between theology and physics once and for all. -Cassier, p. 47. Rousseau also supposed, however, that mankind had a unique capacity to change its nature. While every other species of animals has been naturally provided with the instincts and the capacity needed to sustain its life, human beings are by contrast free agents, capable of choice. As distinct t from creatures that t are always enslaved by their appetites, we are endowed with free will and, as a consequence, at least the prospect of responsibility for determining how we live. Wokler,,p. 56.

5 The Origins of the Modern University: The Humanities In a political system that offered few opportunities for the exercise of political agency outside the structure of the monarchical state, many of these societies furnished an arena in which political opinions could be debated and programs for reform articulated. Moses Mendelsohn The research university forms part of this modern order, in which h the visible ibl and the rational triumphed over the oral and the traditional [ ]The origins of the research university lie in a transformation of academic manners by ministries and markets. German ministers of state and avatars of the market worked, as they saw it, to reform and modernize benighted academics. As a consequence of their efforts, a joint bureaucratization and commodification of academic practices took place, from which h the research university it emerged [ ] The period covered stretches from the Renaissance to Romanticism, with attention to the 1770s to 1830s. Clarke,,p. 3. This plaque honouring Kant is in Kaliningrad, with the words taken from Kant's conclusion in the Critique of Practical Reason: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

6 The Origins of Democratic Revolution (Britain ) Thus the advance of the modern era brought a massive shift in the psychological vector of perceived authority. Whereas in earlier periods of the West s history, wisdom and authority were characteristically located in the past-biblical prophets, ancient bards, classical philosophers, the apostles and early fathers of the church- the modern awareness increasingly located that power in the present, in its own unprecedented achievements, in its own self-consciousness as the evolutionary vanguard of human experience. Tarnas, p Wicked kings and tyrants ought to be put to death; and if the judges and inferior magistrates will not do their office, the power of the sword devolves to the people. King Charles I. was lawfully put to death, and his murderers were the blessed instruments of God s glory in their generations. Zagorin, p. 1. After 1789, a new element entered into the discussion of the question what is enlightenment? the problem of the relationship between enlightenment and revolution. The French Revolution marked the culmination of a century of political upheavals that began in England with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and continued with uprisings in Holland, Corsica, Geneva, the American colonies, London, Ireland, Bohemia, the Austrian Netherlands and Poland. Schmidt, p. 11.

7 The Emergence of the Public Sphere The feudal authorities (Church, princes, and nobility), to which the representative public sphere was first linked, disintegrated during a long process of polarization. By the end of the eighteenth th century they had broken apart into private elements on the one hand, and into public elements on the other. -Calhoun, p The public sphere which mediates between society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion, accords with the principle of the public sphere- that principle of public information which once had to be fought for against the arcane politics of monarchies and which since that time has made possible the democratic control of state activities. - -Calhoun, p.p The importance of the public sphere lies in its potential as a mode of social integration. Public discourse (and what Habermas later and more generally calls communicative action) is a possible mode of coordination of human life, as are state power and market economies. But money and power are nondiscursive modes of coordination, as Habermas later theory stresses; they offer no intrinsic openings to the identification of reason and will, and they suffer from tendencies toward domination and reification. -Calhoun,p. 6.

8 The Birth of the Modern Nation State The Westphalia Peace Treaty Thomas Hobbes The state is surprisingly difficult to define [ ] It is reducible neither to government and administration nor to the nation, yet impossible to detach from both. Bullock, p With the reformation, the universal ambition and dream of the Catholic Imperium was finally defeated. The resulting empowerment of the various separate nations and states of Europe now displaced the old ideal unity of Western Christendom, and the new order was marked by intensely aggressive competition. There was no higher power, international and spiritual, to which all individual states were responsive [ ]The individual secular state now became the defining unit of cultural, as well as political, authority. -Tarnas, pp When [ ] Thomas Hobbes first elaborated the notion of sovereignty in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, [he] was concerned with establishing the legitimacy of a single hierarchy of domestic authority. -Krasner, p. 21.

9 The Treaty of Westphalia & the Modern Nation State The 1648 Peace of Westphalia [ ] [implemented the movement ] that created the modern system of autonomous states. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia Westphalia-which ended the Thirty Years war against the hegemonic power of the Holy Roman Empire delegitimized the already waning transnational role of the Catholic Church and validated the idea that international relations should be driven by balance-ofpower considerations rather than the ideas of Christendom. -Krasner, p. 21. From a sociological point of view, one would add that the institutional core of this modern state is formed by a legally constituted and highly differentiated administrative apparatus which monopolizes the legitimate means of violence and obeys an interesting division of labor with a market society set free for economic functions. -Juergen Habermas, p. 126.

10 The Age of Critique: Immanuel Kant The intellectual challenge that faced Immanuel Kant in the second half of the eighteenth century was a seemingly impossible one: on the one hand, to reconcile the claims of science to certain and genuine knowledge of the world with the claim of philosophy h that t experience could never give rise to such knowledge; on the other hand, to reconcile the claim of religion that man was morally free with the claim of science that nature was entirely determined by necessary laws. - Tarnas,,p Kant [ ] recognized that man could know only the phenomenal, and that any metaphysical conclusions concerning the nature of the universe that went beyond his experience were unfounded. Such propositions of the pure reason, Kant demonstrated, could as readily be opposed as supported by logical argument. Whenever the mind attempted to ascertain the existence of things beyond sensory experience such as God, the immortality of the soul, or the infinity of the universe- it inevitably found itself entangled in contradiction or illusion. -Tarnas, p. 341.

11 The Age of Critique: Hegel Hegel The history of the human mind constantly replayed the drama of the subject s becoming conscious of itself and the consequent destruction of the previously un-criticized form of consciousness. The structures of human knowledge were not fixed and timeless, as Kant supposed, but were historically determined stages that evolved in a continuing dialectic until consciousness achieved absolute knowledge of itself. Tarnas, p A new attentiveness to history and to the evolution of ideas was thereby engendered, with history seen as motivated ultimately not simply by political or economic or biological-i.e., material- factors, though these all played a role, but rather by consciousness itself, by spirit or mind by the self-unfoldment of thought and the power of ideas. Tarnas, p. 381.

12 The Enlightenment: Legacy & Summary Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding is the motto of enlightenment. Immanuel Kant According to Moses Mendelsohn the Enlightenment t seem[ed] to be more related to theoretical matters: to (objective) rational knowledge and to (subjective) facility in rational reflection about matters of human life. Mendelsohn, p. 54. The Enlightenment has been blamed for many things. It has been held responsible for the French revolution, for totalitarianism, and for the view that nature is simply an object to be dominated, manipulated, and exploited. Schmidt, p. 1.

13 To speak of the enlightenment, then, is to speak at once of a historical fact and an ideal reconstruction. It is fact inasmuch as a group of writers, working self-consciously for over a hundred years, sought to enlighten men, using critical reason to free minds from prejudices and unexamined authority, and somewhat later within that period-using the same weapon to explore the ills of society and to devise remedies. Crocker, p. 1. Under the Enlightenment Science replaced religion as preeminent intellectual authority, as definer, judge, and guardian of the cultural world view. Human reason and empirical observation replaced theological doctrine and scriptural revelation as the principle means for comprehending the universe. The domains of religion and metaphysics became gradually compartmentalized, regarded d as personal, subjective, speculative, and fundamentally distinct from public objective knowledge of the empirical world. -Tarnas, p. 286.

14 Module 7 : Macro-skills That is the end of the Module 7 Content: The Enlightenment Follow the links below to commence the macro and micro skills training for this module Identifying, analysing and cultivating the criticalevaluative approach [link] The dialectical method and texts as conversations [link] The logic of critical i essay structures [link]