The Dark Side of the Enlightenment

Similar documents
APEH Chapter 6.notebook October 19, 2015

Chapter 17 - Toward a New World View

The Age of Enlightenment

AP Euro Unit 5/C18 Assignment: A New World View

NAME DATE CLASS. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment Lesson 1 The Scientific Revolution. Moscow

The Age of Enlightenment: Philosophes

The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe, that sought

Answer the following in your notebook:

APEH ch 14.notebook October 23, 2012

The Enlightenment. Main Ideas. Key Terms

CH 15: Cultural Transformations: Religion & Science, Enlightenment

POLI 342: MODERN WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

Y2 Lesson 20 Page numbers, version 12/2/15

What intellectual developments led to the emergence of the Enlightenment? In what type of social environment did the philosophes thrive, and what

THE AGE OF REASON PART II: THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Robert Kiely Office Hours: Tuesday 1-3, Wednesday 1-3, and by appointment

PL 406 HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY Fall 2009

2/8/ A New Way of Thinking: The Birth of Modern Science. Scientific Revolution

The Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution

Ch. 21 in class. Tell me what you think an ABSOLUTE RULER is! (Opener) Think of the word ABSOLUTE carefully!

The Age of Exploration led people to believe that truth had yet to be discovered The Scientific Revolution questioned accepted beliefs and witnessed

Experiment with an Air Pump Joseph Wright

French Absolutism, Enlightenment, & Revolution!

Thomas Hobbes ( )

Enlightenment Scavenger Hunt (Introduction to the Historic Documents Unit) Mods: Clue # Question Answer/Notes: What does enlighten mean?

POLITICAL SCIENCE 3102 (B) Sascha Maicher (Fall 2014)

Ideas of the Enlightenment

The dangers of the sovereign being the judge of rationality

The Enlightenment c

! Jumping ahead 2000 years:! Consider the theory of the self.! What am I? What certain knowledge do I have?! Key figure: René Descartes.

Assignment 8 & 8e Mighty Pens and Swords Dec (due)

Syllabus. Primary Sources, 2 edition. Hackett, Various supplementary handouts, available in class and on the course website.

A History of Western Thought Why We Think the Way We Do. Summer 2016 Ross Arnold

Syllabus. Primary Sources, 2 edition. Hackett, Various supplementary handouts, available in class and on the course website.

Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Mrs. Brahe World History II

Background to Early Modern Philosophy. Philosophy 22 Fall, 2009 G. J. Mattey

The Age of Enlightenment

Introduction to Philosophy Levels 1 and 2

Philosophy 18: Early Modern Philosophy

Modern Europe- Cooke January, 2015 Modern Europe Midterm Study Guide

PHILOSOPHICAL RAMIFICATIONS: THEORY, EXPERIMENT, & EMPIRICAL TRUTH

Name: Date: Period: Chapter 17 Reading Guide The Transformation of the West, p

A. True or False Where the statement is true, mark T. Where it is false, mark F, and correct it in the space immediately below.

BLHS-108 Enlightenment, Revolution and Democracy Fall 2017 Mondays 6:30-10:05pm Room: C215

Small Group Assignment 8: Science Replaces Scholasticism

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LIBERAL STUDIES PROGRAM SYLLABUS. THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERNITY LSHV 442 Section 01 (Fall, 2015) Thursday 6:30 9:15 PM ICC 204A

Political Science 103 Fall, 2018 Dr. Edward S. Cohen INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Is it true he isn t curving the test grade? OF COURSE HE S CURVING IT! WHAT S WRONG WITH YOU?

Big Questions: How did political rebellions affect the political structures and ideologies around the world?

Notes on the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment

Success quote. I have never found a person who didn t do better at work when he was appreciated rather than criticized. -Charles Schwab paraphrase

A Brief History of Thinking about Thinking Thomas Lombardo

Revolution and Reaction: Political Thought From Kant to Nietzsche

Immanuel Kant, Analytic and Synthetic. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Preface and Preamble

Jesus Christ Edict of Milan emperor worship paganism religio illicita = illegal religion ❶ the apostolic age (33 100) ❷ the persecuted age ( )

Mini-Unit #2. Enlightenment

Introduction to Philosophy: The Big Picture

Chapter 16 Reading Guide The Transformation of the West, PART IV THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD, : THE WORLD SHRINKS (PG.

Lockean Liberalism and the American Revolution

Robert Kiely Office Hours: Monday 4:15 6:00; Wednesday 1-3; Thursday 2-3

Introduction to Deductive and Inductive Thinking 2017

Wed, 1:30-4:00 Office hours: Mon, 1:30-3:30 Packard Conference Room Packard Hall 109

Reading Questions for Phil , Fall 2016 (Daniel)

Philosophy Courses Fall 2016

AP World History Notes Chapter 16: Science and Religion ( )

Wednesday, April 20, 16. Introduction to Philosophy

What. A New Way of Thinking...modern consciousness.

What did we just learn? Let s Review

Hume s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Intermediate World History B. Unit 7: Changing Empires, Changing Ideas. Lesson 1: Elizabethan England and. North American Initiatives Pg.

A SURVEY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY Thursday Morning Bible Study Week Seven: From May 18, 2017

EXAMINERS REPORT AM PHILOSOPHY

Lecture 18: Rationalism

The Enlightenment. Reason Natural Law Hope Progress

The British Empiricism

THE HISTORY OF MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT Wednesdays 6-8:40 p.m.

You Will Be Able to Answer These Questions at the End of Class

Anne Conway s Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy Study Guide

Welcome back to WHAP! Monday, January 29, 2018

POL320 Y1Y/L0101: MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT Summer 2015

EMPIRICISM & EMPIRICAL PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 17 The Age of Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Thought

A Studying of Limitation of Epistemology as Basis of Toleration with Special Reference to John Locke

Supplemental Material 2a: The Proto-psychologists. In this presentation, we will have a short review of the Scientific Revolution and the

Why Do Freemasons Keep Secrets?

The Enlightenment in Europe

EXAM PREP (Semester 2: 2018) Jules Khomo. Linguistic analysis is concerned with the following question:

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL EXAMINATIONS Cambridge International Level 3 Pre-U Certificate Principal Subject

Final Exam Review. Age of Reason and Scientific Revolution

Carefully analyze the image in the Introduction of the Student Text. As you discuss the questions below with your class, record your answers.

1 DAVID DAVIS. ANDREW MARR SHOW, 12 TH MARCH 2017 DAVID DAVIS, Secretary of State for Exiting the EU

Emergence of Modern Science

Locke Resource Card. Quotes from Locke s Works

The Age of the Enlightenment

How Ancient Greece Influenced Western Civilization and The United States Government.

Colonial America and the Enlightenment I. a. i.copernicus (1543), Galileo (1632) 1. Pushed the theory, challenged long held belief 2.

Humanities 3 V. The Scientific Revolution

Introduction to Philosophy 1301

1. Base your answer to the question on the cartoon below and on your knowledge of social studies.

As background to the modern era, summarize the chief contributions of each of the following to Western civilization:

Transcription:

The Dark Side of the Enlightenment By Yoram Hazony, May 6, 2018 A lot of people are selling Enlightenment these days. After the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, David Brooks published a paean to the Enlightenment project, declaring it under attack and calling on readers to rise up and save it. Commentary magazine sent me a letter asking for a donation to provide readers with the enlightenment we all so desperately crave. And now there s Steven Pinker s impressive new book Enlightenment Now, which may be the definitive statement of the neo-enlightenment movement that is fighting the tide of nationalist thinking in America, Britain and beyond. Do we all crave enlightenment? I don t. I like and respect Mr. Pinker, Mr. Brooks and others in their camp. But Enlightenment philosophy didn t achieve a fraction of the good they claim, and it has done much harm. Boosters of the Enlightenment make an attractive case. Science, medicine, free political institutions, the market economy these things have dramatically improved our lives. They are all, Mr. Pinker writes, the result of a process set in motion by the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, when philosophers replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking. Mr. Brooks concurs, assuring his readers that the Enlightenment project gave us the modern world. So give thanks for thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that people should stop deferring blindly to authority and instead think things through from the ground up.

As Mr. Pinker sums it up: Progress is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and will continue to the extent that we rededicate ourselves to those ideals. Very little of this is true. Consider the claim that the U.S. Constitution was a product of Enlightenment thought, derived by throwing out the political traditions of the past and applying unfettered human reason. Disproving this idea requires only reading earlier writers on the English constitution. The widely circulated 15th-century treatise In Praise of the Laws of England, written by the jurist and statesman John Fortescue, clearly explains due process and the theory now called checks and balances. The English constitution, Fortescue wrote, establishes personal liberty and economic prosperity by shielding the individual and his property from the government. The protections that appear in the U.S. Bill of Rights were mostly set down in the 1600s by those drafting England s constitutional documents men such as John Selden, Edward Hyde and Matthew Hale. These statesmen and philosophers articulated the principles of modern Anglo-American constitutionalism centuries before the U.S. was created. Yet they were not Enlightenment men. They were religious, English nationalists and political conservatives. They were familiar with the claim that unfettered reason should remake society, but they rejected it in favor of developing a traditional constitution that had proved itself. When Washington, Jay, Hamilton and Madison initiated a national government for the U.S., they primarily turned to this conservative tradition, adapting it to local conditions. Nor is there much truth in the assertion that we owe modern science and medicine to Enlightenment thought. A more serious claim of origin can be made by the Renaissance, the period between the 15th and 17th centuries, particularly in Italy, Holland and England. Tradition-bound English kings, for example, sponsored pathbreaking scientific institutions such as the

Royal College of Physicians, founded in 1518. One of its members, William Harvey, discovered the circulation of the blood in the early 17th century. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660, was led by such men as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, decisive figures in physics and chemistry. Again, these were politically and religiously conservative figures. They knew the arguments, later associated with the Enlightenment, for overthrowing political, moral and religious tradition, but mostly they rejected them. In short, the principal advances that today s Enlightenment enthusiasts want to claim were set in motion much earlier. And it isn t at all clear how helpful the Enlightenment was once it arrived. What, then, was the Enlightenment? This term was promoted, first and foremost, by the late-18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Mr. Pinker opens his first chapter by endorsing Kant s declaration that only reason allows human beings to emerge from their self-incurred immaturity by casting aside the dogmas and formulas of authority and tradition. For Kant, reason is universal, infallible and a priori meaning independent of experience. As far as reason is concerned, there is one eternally valid, unassailably correct answer to every question in science, morality and politics. Man is rational only to the extent that he recognizes this and spends his time trying to arrive at that one correct answer. This astonishing arrogance is based on a powerful idea: that mathematics can produce universal truths by beginning with self-evident premises or, as Rene Descartes had put it, clear and distinct ideas and then proceeding by means of infallible deductions to what Kant called apodictic certainty. Since this method worked in mathematics, Descartes had insisted, it could be applied to all other disciplines. The idea was

subsequently taken up and refined by Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as Kant. This view of reason and of its power, freed from the shackles of history, tradition and experience is what Kant called Enlightenment. It is completely wrong. Human reason is incapable of reaching universally valid, unassailably correct answers to the problems of science, morality and politics by applying the methods of mathematics. The first warning of this was Descartes s 1644 magnum opus, The Principles of Philosophy, which claimed to reach a final determination of the nature of the universe by moving from self-evident premises through infallible deductions. This voluminous work is so scandalously absurd that no unabridged English version is in print today. Yet Descartes s masterpiece took Europe by storm and for decades was the main textbook of the Cartesian school of science. Kant followed this dubious example with his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), in which he claimed to have deduced Newton s laws of motion using pure reason, without empirical evidence. It was once well understood that much of the modern world s success grew out of conservative traditions that were openly skeptical of reason. When I was a graduate student at Rutgers in the 1980s, the introductory course in modern political theory had a section called Critics of the Enlightenment. These figures included more conservative thinkers such as David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. They emphasized the unreliability of abstract reasoning, which they believed could end up justifying virtually any idea, no matter how disconnected from reality, as long as it sounded self-evidently true to someone. One such myth was Locke s claim that the state was founded on a contract among free and equal individuals a theory the Enlightenment s critics

understood to be both historically false and dangerous. While the theory did relatively little harm in tradition-bound Britain, it led to catastrophe in Europe. Imported into France by Rousseau, it quickly pulled down the monarchy and the state, producing a series of failed constitutions, the Reign of Terror and finally the Napoleonic Wars all in the name of infallible and universal reason. Millions died as Napoleon s armies sought to destroy and rebuild every government in Europe in accordance with the one correct political theory allowed by Enlightenment philosophy. Yet Napoleon was simply trying, in Mr. Brooks s phrase, to think things through from the ground up. Advocates of the Enlightenment tend to skip this part of the story. Mr. Pinker s 450-page book doesn t mention the French Revolution. Mr. Pinker cites Napoleon as an exponent of martial glory but says nothing about his launching a universal war in the name of reason. These writers also tend to pass over Karl Marx s debt to the Enlightenment. Marx saw himself as promoting universal reason, extending the work of the French Revolution by insisting that the workers of the world stop (again in Mr. Brooks s words) deferring blindly to authority. The science Marx developed from the ground up killed tens of millions in the 20th century. The Enlightenment also propagated the myth that people s only moral obligations are those they freely choose by reasoning. That theory has devastated the family, an institution built on moral obligations that many people, it turns out, won t choose unless guided by tradition. Mr. Pinker s book is filled with charts showing the improvement in material conditions in recent centuries. He offers us no charts describing the breakdown of marriage or the increase in out-of-wedlock births in enlightened societies. Nor is he worried about the destruction of religion or the national state. Kant believed that both were out of conformity with reason, and Mr. Pinker sees no grounds to disagree.

Which brings us to the heart of what s wrong with the neo-enlightenment movement. Mr. Pinker praises skepticism as a cornerstone of the Enlightenment s paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge. But the principal figures of Enlightenment philosophy weren t skeptics. Just the opposite: Their aim was to create their own system of universal, certain truths, and in that pursuit they were as rigid as the most dogmatic medievals. Anglo-Scottish conservatives, from Richard Hooker and Selden to Smith and Burke, were after something very different. They defended national and religious custom even as they cultivated a moderate skepticism a combination the English-speaking world called common sense. If old institutions weren t in evident need of repair, a common-sense view favored leaving them unmolested, since there was always the risk of making things much worse. But it also saw the potential in attempts to improve mankind s knowledge, so long as the weakness and unreliability of human reason were kept firmly in view. As Newton wrote in his Opticks: Arguing from experiments and observations by induction be no demonstration of general conclusions, yet it is the best way of arguing which the nature of things admits of. I think of these moderate, skeptical words frequently these days, as I follow the political and cultural transformation of the English-speaking world. American and British elites, once committed to a blend of tradition and skepticism, now clamor for Enlightenment. They insist that they have attained universal certainties. They display contempt worthy of Kant himself toward those who decline to embrace their dogmas branding them unenlightened, immature, illiberal, backward-looking, deplorable and worse. If these elites still had access to common sense, they wouldn t talk this way. Enlightenment overconfidence has gone badly wrong often enough to

warrant serious doubts about claims made in the name of reason just as doubt is valuable in approaching other systems of dogma. Such doubts would counsel toleration for different ways of thinking. National and religious institutions may not fit with the Enlightenment, but they may have important things to teach us nonetheless. The most important political truth of our generation may be this: You can t have both Enlightenment and skepticism. You have to choose. A version of this essay appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 6, 2018. You can read the original here.