At the Libre Pensée
Just one more thing. The first three paragraphs of this review of biographies of Rousseau and Voltaire in the Nation. They’re good.
After all, the great battles of the Enlightenment had burned out long before. Religious intolerance and fanaticism were no longer matters of major concern. Indeed, for many of my French fellow students, the great enemy was the Enlightenment itself. Every week they would cram into a crowded lecture hall at the Collège de France to hear Michel Foucault, then in the last year of his life, explain how the eighteenth century saw the imprisoning of the Western world in a straitjacket of mental discipline. They struggled to grasp the quicksilver sentences in which Jacques Derrida deconstructed the criteria of rationality and truth that eighteenth-century philosophy had taken as axiomatic. They spoke derisively of an Enlightenment that had culminated not in modern democracy but in Auschwitz.
Yes and I kept asking plaintively ‘So what would you like instead? What do you want instead of the Enlightenment? What do you propose to use instead of rationality and truth?’ And by gum – you’ll be amazed to hear this – answer came there none. So I sat down and folded my hands and waited patiently for B&W to come into existence.
Today, things look rather different. Pace Foucault, enlightened psychiatrists and prison reformers do not seem particularly dangerous compared with suicide bombers and book burners. In the twenty-first century the Enlightenment appears anything but the triumphant imperial “project” denounced by vulgar postmodernists. Its heritage is fragile and endangered. Admittedly, its works remain in the “canon”–but perhaps only because they go largely unread in certain quarters. I sometimes wonder what would happen if, for instance, a public university system asked all entering students to read Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, with its deep, deliberate offensiveness toward Christianity.
No need to wonder – the merde would hit the fan, that’s what.
Of course, the really sad thing about the historical Enlightenment, as David Bell pretty much acknowledges, is that it was always already [great po-mo phrase, that] falling apart from inside and out. So that what we have as ‘the Enlightenment’ is our own selection of what we think is good from an era when things we would think both good and bad were mixed together by people in the most unexpected and unstable ways.
Nothing wrong with that, of course, but whenever we use ‘the Enlightenment’ as a touchstone of our beliefs [which even I am prone to do amidst the current ghastliness, which will make David Bell smile if ever he should come across this, since I once accused him of gross naivety on the subject], we are really just using it as a label to refer to our own ideas, not to a coherent historical reality.
There were individuals in the period who shared pretty much all of what we would think of as ‘Enlightened’ values, but they were dam’ few and far between, and of little noticeable public impact.
G Tingey
I think you have a point here. There may not be a coherent set of ideas which derive from the Enlightenment but those whic h are attacked by the post- modernists are certainly worth defending.
This means that our version of the Enlightenment consists of those ideas which are attacked by post- modernists. Our range of ideas are defined by our opponents.
My reaction to this is that I don’t care. They are still good ideas.
I recently read some stuff by John Paul II in which without any supporting evidence presented said that the Enlightenment led to Communism and Fascism. I thought this claim ridiculous.
Leaving aside Communism and only taking the Fascism claim, this surely arose as a reactionary response to the Enlightenment. Most fascisms have a strong streak of religion (many European ones are Catholic and Vatican approved as well; see those fascisms of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, etc.). The Enlightenment is, by this argument, only ‘responsible’ for Fascism in the same way as Nadia Anjuman was responsible for her own death.
It seems as if I am wrong as I using facts and not the different truths of pomo.
Ironically (and irony was a big thing in Enlightenment times), the medieval minded JP II has allies in Foucault and Derrida or at least their arguments (if you can have an argument if rationality cannot be used).
I absolutely agree with Mike that fascism represents a reactionary response to the enlightenment. Not sure about communism, though. There was a totalitarian side of enlightenment thinking, which put together the ‘blank slate’ view of human nature with the belief in the rule of an enlightened elite, and came to the conclusion that the enlightened rulers could and should remake humanity. Isaiah Berlin had some good analyses of these tendencies. In general, I think that ideologies that start out meaning to be rationalistic can become obscurantist when their claims start to be falsified.
I also agree with the previous comments that we need to distinguish the enlightenment as a historical phenomenon with enlightenment as a set of ideas.Obviously our loyalty is to the latter. As a brave (or foolhardy) attempt to sum these up, I would say: scientific rationalism and liberal humanism.
Of course whole books could be written (and probably have been) and hours of argument expended on the meaning of each of those words, but for me they do very well as a starting point.
A debate on the meaning of enlightenment might be quite – enlightening?
I think the problem with the “Catholic case for Enlightenment-into-fascism” is that it effectively has to define ‘enlightenment’ as anything that isn’t explicitly religious, which is far too wide.
You can show that fascism emerged out of a romantic, anti-enlightenment reaction. The rebellions against the Napoleonic occupation of the German states led to the demand for an ideology to differentiate Germany from ‘enlightenment’ France. This led to the belief that there was a specifically German ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ which was poetic and mystical rather than rational. In the post-Napoleonic era German liberalism always had the stigma of association with collaboration with foreign occupation, and this weakened it in relation to more authoritarian, mystical and nationalistic tendencies.
A parallel with the modern middle east, perhaps?
I didn’t say the RC case was sound, I just said what it *was*…. The Church would undoubtedly blame everything in Harry’s last post on the same ‘turning away from God’ as Voltaire, etc were convicted of by the conspiracy-theorists who said they started the French revolution just to have a pop at the Church…
Let’s face it, if the Pope *doesn’t* blame the world’s problems on the fact that people aren’t being good Catholics, what is he there for, eh? eh?
Dave, I understand you weren’t defending the Catholic case. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise.
I guess if one is a religious fundamentalist then of course it makes sense to blame everything that’s gone wrong in the last 200 years on a turning away from God. Of course, that ignores everything that’s gone right during the same period, e.g. improved life expectancy, better education, amazing improvements in living standards, abolition of slavery, improved status of women, scientific progress, etc. etc., most of which occurred in the teeth of opposition from the Vatican.
It also ignores the evils of pre-modern societies. The main reason why 20th century genocides were much larger than previous ones is simply that the population was correspondingly larger.
Wasn’t significant elements of the Catholic church heavily involved in Fascism? If not as directly in Germany, certainly in Italy and even more so in Franco’s Spain. Isn’t there a bit of smug hypocrisy involved here?
The RC Church? Smug hypocrisy? Why do the words ‘no shit, Sherlock’ rise unbidden to my lips?
It’s just that pious platitudineers (a word? If not, it should be!) just assume that no-one will point out nasty little “secrets” like this. They just assume a sage wagging of the heads. “Yes, yes. We need Mother Church to protect us from the nasty totalitarianism of the Godless.”