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After the (relative) success of the Heidegger thread, there was some discussion of how and why "Rationality" developed in (Western) philosophy. And for that matter, what "Rationality"/"Reason"/"The Enlightenment" were, and why people rebelled against them. This is, as you can believe, a Big Issue, so I will be giving a cliff's note version, and hope that people will tell me why I am wrong in the comments. "The Age of Reason" is generally considered to start in Western Philosophy with Rene Descartes, who famously said "I think, therefore I am", putting the individual mind, able to reason from first principles, at the center of his cognitive universe. Over the next two hundred or so years, from the early 1600s to the early 1800s, we have the core "Enlightenment", seeing not just the rise of philosophy, but also the differentiation of science, politics, and the humanities into separate fields of inquiry with "Reason" as a guide. Sometime in the 1800s, despite its success at developing modern science and industry, "The Enlightenment" ran out of gas philosophically, and was replaced with philosophies that took perspectives outside of strict "Rationality". But what were the hallmarks of The Enlightenment? There are two things that are not marks of the Enlightenment, but seem like they should be. They were necessary conditions, but had existed for thousands of years without producing an enlightenment. 1. Formal logic and syllogisms: during the period when written philosophy was growing explosively in Greece, India and China, all of those cultures had developed, in different ways, formal rules on how to use terms logically. Aristotle's basic syllogisms were taught through the Middle Ages, the Indian views of the syllogism were preserved, and the Chinese discussion of whether a White Horse was a Horse was studied and debated and would have been familiar even when Chinese philosophy moved in different directions. 2. Dialectic, discussion and comparing: Along with the bare bones syllogism, the process of comparing two arguments and points of view, and trying to find an answer that synthesizes them, was part of philosophy for a long time. Medieval Church Philosophy, Scholasticism, was based exactly on that, with Thomas Aquinas using point and counterpoint when he synthesized biblical, church, Greek and Arabic sources to write his magnum opus of Theology. So then, starting with Descartes, we start to have additional factors that brought about the Enlightenment. 3. Universability. The real point of Descartes "I think therefore I am", is that anyone, anywhere, at any time, can have access to the same thoughts and procedures. This led to The Englightenment being able to develop models that were rationally true, even if their authors knew they were not true in fact. Immanuel Kant could make a categorical imperative that worked for space aliens. Isaac Newton could talk about an earth made of a series of shells. Hobbes and Rosseau could talk about "Social Contracts", even though they know that these things were not literally true. By talking in terms of universals, actual situations could be seen in terms of their constituent phenomena that were universally true. 4. Non-compulsion. An important part of rational discourse is that the ability to think, speak, and argue, and to agree and not-agree, without either moral or physical compulsion. Very obvious for us now, but the idea that someone could put forward a hypothetical idea, and have it judged on its own merits, without being in danger of being damned or executed, was an important part of reason. This is obviously an important point, and provides some of the most emotionally strong feelings towards enlightenment values: Galileo's punishment by the church for following reason is one of the most dramatic moments of the Enlightenment. 5. Separation into domains. Perhaps overlooked, but before those years, religion, science, sociology, psychology and politics were all talked about in the same terms, and an explanation for one thing had to take the others into account. This is in both the sense of needing religious or social authority to have a scientific debate, but also in religious and scientific truths needing to be synchronized: there were seven planets because there were seven virtues. The four temperaments of the human body were in harmony with the four elements. And so on. A big part of the age of reason was allowing scientific discoveries to be made without asking the humanities' permission, and vice versa. 6. Isolation of factors. As we learn in eighth grade science, growing tomato plants for the science fair, experiments need controls and for other variables to be removed. The scientific method didn't spring up fully formed, but in both the sciences and the humanities, people tried to understand phenomena without extraneous factors. What would it be like if a feather and a hammer both dropped in a vacuum? What if a morally bad ruler was ruling in a good system of government? Instead of depending on a single narrative that explained everything, different factors could be mentally taken and removed. This is, of course, related to #5. Okay, that was my thumbnail sketch. Are there other basic factors? Do some of these not count, or belong together? Did I make this too pat? Obviously the development of science and political philosophy were different, but I tried to look at what they had in common (#3) while realizing they are separate domains (#5). Also, I didn't get to it here, but you can contribute: when did these start falling apart, and why?
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Feb 26, 2019 18:19
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They say that new instruments create new sciences - that the development of telescopes created the modern science of astronomy or that better microscopes lead to the development of germ theory - and I think the same is true of the social sciences. In my mind one of the most remarkable aspects of the Enlightenment was the emerge of new paradigms for conceiving of society as a discrete social object that could be viewed from a state-centric top down perspective. Suddenly instead of kingdoms or domains you have populations of individuals and the states that can best manage and control their populations stand in a clear advantage over the states that cannot. One of the factors underlying this change is the emergence of the modern discipline of statistics. Today we more or less take for granted that you can discover mathematical regularities in society that yield useful predictions or lend themselves to further analysis. However, this was a radical new discovery when it was first made. Keeping track of things like birth and death rates or annual mortality statistics made it possible for scholars and bureaucrats to countenance political goals that would have never even occured to a medieval monarch or their advisers. A new way of understanding society, relying on mathematical analysis of behaviour at the population level, helped create the modern world we take for granted. From the wikipedia on the history of stats: Wikipedia, History of Statistics posted:The birth of statistics is often dated to 1662, when John Graunt, along with William Petty, developed early human statistical and census methods that provided a framework for modern demography. He produced the first life table, giving probabilities of survival to each age. His book Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality used analysis of the mortality rolls to make the first statistically based estimation of the population of London. He knew that there were around 13,000 funerals per year in London and that three people died per eleven families per year. He estimated from the parish records that the average family size was 8 and calculated that the population of London was about 384,000; this is the first known use of a ratio estimator. Laplace in 1802 estimated the population of France with a similar method; see Ratio estimator § History for details. I've always thought it was really interesting to relate the philosophical and political developments of the early modern period with the development of new ways of viewing society. While many ancient authors wrote on the topic of population sizes or birth rates none of the writings known to us demonstrate the conceptual tools that would have been necessary to develop these scattered observations into an actual science of populations. Many of the best and worst aspects of the modern world can be traced back to this growing awareness of demographics and the almost inescapable temptation that this knowledge brings to try and consciously manipulate society on a much deeper level than the ancients would have dreamed possible.
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Feb 27, 2019 22:22
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Helsing posted:
One of the things that I didn't mention in my post, but which I think is important for understanding how knowledge grew, is that it wasn't a matter of a single lightbulb going off in someone's head saying "And now we have REASON!", as much as that for hundreds of years, you got an incremental growth in physical and conceptual tools for looking at the world. Things that we wouldn't even think about, like making paper that is a little better in quality, so books lasted longer and could be read by more people, were as important for the development of philosophy as Descartes saying "I think, therefore I am". But I don't know the entire history of how and when this technological change took place, and how it enabled the propagation of philosophical thought.
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Feb 27, 2019 22:40
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That's a really interesting topic and I hope this thread takes off, thank you for making it! I view the Enlightenment from a perspective that's a bit different than many people, I think: As a historian of Catholic culture during the Baroque I see the Enlightenment not as a beginning, but rather as an end, and I don't see it unequivocally positive either. I will quickly summarise what I think the Enlightenment is, and you can then tell me why I am wrong  The first thing I ask people when they are talking about "the Enlightenment" is "which one?". "The Enlightenment" is a collective term describing a loose set of philosophical ideas that were shared and worked on by many different thinkers across many different nations, religions, backgrounds and times, roughly beginning in the mid-to-late 17th century in England and ending in the early 19th century, when it was ideologically, philosophically and artistically replaced by schools of thinking that again placed more emphasise on what they saw as the more "irrational" or emotional aspects of existence. There is no real definite set of Enlightenment ideals; not even Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" is representative for all of its many subcurrents. Generally speaking it revolves around the various point glowing-fish described in his OP, and to that I would also add the idea that Enlightenment thinkers represent something drastically new (even if objectively speaking they were as much children of their time as anybody else). Enlightened philosophers tended to perceive themselves as brave thinkers at the very forefront of human existence, finally destroying the dark era that lay behind them and leading humanity into an age of, well, enlightenment. They were pretty similar to humanists during the 15th and 16th centuries in that regard, I would think. When you look at Enlightenment thinkers from a Catholic perspective, than it becomes quickly apparent that most of them come from a very specific set of people, i.e. Protestant, anti-clerical lapsed Catholic or all-out atheism by religion, and bourgeoisie by social stratum. While there definitely was a specifically Catholic Enlightenment, it took on a quite different shape than Protestant/non-Catholic Enlightenment(s) and again split into many different subcurrents, beginning from the quasi-Protestant Jansenism at the one extreme to what is basically a "Baroque Enlightenment" at the other, which mostly involved reducing or abolishing those popular religious practices and ideas that its representatives saw as especially irrational or superstitious, but otherwise not changing the social or religio-cultural landscape too much (Eusebius Amort would be a prominent representative of that school in Bavaria). This very specific background of many Enlightenment thinkers also proved to be Enlightenment's greatest flaw in my opinion. Much of their thinking was heavily influenced by an old enmity towards not only the Catholic Church, but Catholics as well, be it due to their Protestantism or because they perceived themselves as free thinkers in a Catholic country (many of the French Enlightenment authors of that time either fall into that category or were heavily influenced by Jansenist thought). Reading enlightened texts of that time, it is striking to me how vicious Catholicism is attacked, how little the authors' own background is questioned, and how at times almost racist their depiction of those dumb Catholic idiots can be. Take for example this excerpt of Berlin-based Friedrich Nicolai, who visited Munich in 1781: quote:When we visited [the Augustine church], the novices were praying, all of them being rather tall. How much did I wish for a pen in that moment, so that I could have painted those faces, all so similar to each other, to show the features of their dumb and fanatic tension, united with submission into blind obedience, as it appeared in those novices' faces, at once both rigid and flabby. There is hardly any scene more fraught with humiliation of the human race than when watching Catholic monks. Yikes. This was hardly the only instance of Nicolai describing Catholics in that way, and he was hardly the only one, even if Nicolai was admittedly a pretty prominent and provocative author in that regard (As a small aside: Nicolai also had some beef with Goethe after harshly criticising his "Sorrows of Young Werther", to which Goethe reacted by penning a poem in which Nicolai literally takes a poo poo on Werther's grave while feeling smug about it, and that's even without going into the reactions provoked by Nicolai's famous "leeches at the arse" therapy ). The bourgeois background of so many authors and thinkers also turned into a really strong classist sentiment, often unconciously aimed at peasants and the rural as well as urban poor. Many Enlightenment thinkers were obsessed with the idea of rationalising the economy and maximising its output, effectively viewing the common people as little more than cogs in a machine aimed at generating profit and additional growth. From this perspective, modern capitalism is unthinkable without the Enlightenment (the idea of constant technological progress being both a given and something that is unequivocally good is also something that first originated with the Enlightenment). You can see this anti-Catholicism (or, in Catholic countries, anti-clericalism and anti-Baroque) coming together with enlightened classism when e.g. Catholic countries drastically reduced the number of holidays in order to up economic growth, abolished pilgrimages because they were deemed to be superstitious and a waste of time which could otherwise be spent working and paradoxically worsened the situation of many rural poor by abolishing the last remnants of feudal structures as well as dissolving most of the monasteries (this was especially bad in Bavaria) without considering what might be the alternative. Especially the monasteries were huge local employers and also the main forces behind what little social welfare there were back then, and when the state got rid of them and partitioned their possessions amongst the bourgeoisie and nobility, thousands and thousands of people were suddenly without job or prospect and turned to the cities, where they grew into what the 19th century would know as the lumpenproletariat. The Enlightenment cast itself into the role of the brave and daring thinker finally dismantling Europe's dark and oppressive past, but in reality what they got rid of was decidedly *not* a remnant of an earlier and uncultured time, but a very specific and Catholic way of looking at reality and living in it; a way of life not obsessed with economic growth and efficient use of your own time, but an era and a society characterised by the Swiss historian Peter Hersche as being characterised by its common drive towards "leisure and extravagance" (Muße und Verschwendung). Essentially, the Enlightenment constituted a victory of Protestant-style capitalism, rationalism and nationalism over Catholic culture of its day, and this would be a problematic heritage to be sure. In summary, the Enlightenment is a land of contrasts There are a great deal of things brought to us if not by the Enlightenment, than at least spearheaded by it that we can be thankful for, like the boom of both natural science and the humanities, freedom of speech and religion, the eventual democratisation of previously monarchical societies etc. But on the other we also have to see that many (if not most) of the problems of our age can also be at least in part traced back to Enlightenment thought and ideals, beginning with nationalism/right-wing extremism and ending with climate change and the nuclear bomb. If I had to sum it up I would say that the Enlightenment mustn't be lionised: it was a massively important and also very diverse school of thought, and many of its ideals continue to greatly shape the way we live today. But it would be wrong to characterise it as simply "good" (like Stephen Pinker does) or "bad" (like e.g. Catholic ultratraditionalists do without realising that their own ideological existence is utterly unthinkable without the Enlightenment). It is one era of many that brought us to where we are today, and we must see it with all the good and bad it left, and in all its own variety that it had during its time.
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Feb 28, 2019 14:14
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Somewhat unrelated, but I read this recently https://brill.com/view/title/16465 quote:
Turns out that the vast majority of Protestant missionaries in late 19th Century China dismissed syllogistic logic as Catholic Jesuit nonsense and as having no real relation to scientific empiricism and positivism icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Mar 1, 2019 00:53
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Tell me about Hegel's self-conscious relation to the Enlightenment? As I understand it he's not an explicitly anti-modernist/anti-Enlightenment position like Heidegger, but sees himself as building on Kant and completing Kant's legacy in a sense?
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Mar 1, 2019 01:32
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System Metternich posted:In summary, the Enlightenment is a land of contrasts I agree. One of the things about the Enlightenment was that it lent itself to reductionism. We got into that in the Heidegger thread, because the Enlightenment split into idealism and positivism. It wasn't necessarily inevitable that rational thought take a path down the road to reductionism and positivism, but in the particular case of the European enlightenment, it did. Some of it is inevitable with the principles I mentioned. One of the most important things about the Enlightenment is that question of fact got separated from questions of morality. Science could be developed as an independent discipline. Which is good, except, as we learned over and over again in Jurassic Park, sometimes people were so busy wondering whether they could, and didn't ask if they should... Okay, I might have more smart things to say about this tomorrow.
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Mar 1, 2019 02:33
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Although this thread was not as wildly popular as I hoped, but I wanted to express some other things that I think would be of interest to people. One of the basic ideas of "rationality" is that we have the ability to think abstractly, and at a remove from our own experiences and biases. Which is a good thing. Mostly. This also means that ideas should be accepted from all quarters, and should be accepted on their own merits, without censorship or dismissal. Dissent should be allowed, even encouraged. In academic philosophy, around the late 1800s, a group of philosophers, who would now be considered the proto-existentialists, started challenging that by writing of humans as living lives that were limited by time and space, and that involved making individual decisions, not merely selecting dispassionately from an endless array of ideas. That is pretty much the one paragraph description of what Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky had in common. But I wanted to skip ahead to a more common problem that is confronting a lot of us today. How do we deal with the idea that "every argument is valid and should be judged on its own merits", when there are so many bad faith arguments, and when we have so much information coming in constantly, and insufficient time to analyze every possible viewpoint on its merits? "They said Galileo was wrong" is one of the biggest clichés possible, and it brings up the memory of one of the turning points that led to the Enlightenment. The problem is that everyone who is selling Shark Cartilage as a cure for cancer thinks that they are Galileo. I don't have an answer for that, but in my practical, every day life, I have to "censor" ideas, on some level, because I know that people arguing in bad faith can present ideas in a seemingly rational way, in order to put forward an argument that does not really make sense. I also know that they can just make me play "whack-a-mole", having to expend mental energy to disprove misleading or dubious claims until I can't think straight about anything. I have to do something that seems bad to the Enlightenment: use my emotion to analyze the overall timbre of an argument, rather than try to look at it logically, piece by piece. (while writing this, I was very much thinking of the Australian terrorist's manifesto, which combined absurdism and misdirection in order to hide his real purposes) glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 23:55
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Helsing posted:They say that new instruments create new sciences - that the development of telescopes created the modern science of astronomy or that better microscopes lead to the development of germ theory - and I think the same is true of the social sciences. Cybernetics gets into this there is the technology and then the suite of ideas nessisary to use it. Either one could come first and imply the other. So don't just think about in the tech to ideas direction.
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Mar 19, 2019 00:03
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glowing-fish posted:I have to do something that seems bad to the Enlightenment: use my emotion to analyze the overall timbre of an argument, rather than try to look at it logically, piece by piece. Reason can look at the gestalt, rationality has to go piece by piece.
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Mar 19, 2019 00:06
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glowing-fish posted:But I wanted to skip ahead to a more common problem that is confronting a lot of us today. How do we deal with the idea that "every argument is valid and should be judged on its own merits", when there are so many bad faith arguments, and when we have so much information coming in constantly, and insufficient time to analyze every possible viewpoint on its merits? "They said Galileo was wrong" is one of the biggest clichés possible, and it brings up the memory of one of the turning points that led to the Enlightenment. The problem is that everyone who is selling Shark Cartilage as a cure for cancer thinks that they are Galileo. I think to a certain extent ambiguity of language is generating that seeming contradiction. "Argument" in the sense you're using it encompases both attempts to get to the truth of a matter through logic and observation and persuasive rhetoric, which is just about the opposite of that. Sorting the good poo poo from the bullshit is not only something consistent with Enlightenment values but also a task we have in common with the thinkers of the day. glowing-fish posted:I have to do something that seems bad to the Enlightenment: use my emotion to analyze the overall timbre of an argument, rather than try to look at it logically, piece by piece. I'm not sure why you'd conclude this is your only option in the face of an argument-rich world, however. That is indeed being a bad Enlightenment thinker and a ton of propaganda directed at you is going to have the feels you emotionally interpret as right - that's the whole point of propagada. Instead, it seems like the more Enlightenment option would be to reserve judgement on arguments that aren't important enough to merit looking at through an objective lens. quote:I don't have an answer for that, but in my practical, every day life, I have to "censor" ideas, on some level, because I know that people arguing in bad faith can present ideas in a seemingly rational way, in order to put forward an argument that does not really make sense. I also know that they can just make me play "whack-a-mole", having to expend mental energy to disprove misleading or dubious claims until I can't think straight about anything. I have to do something that seems bad to the Enlightenment: use my emotion to analyze the overall timbre of an argument, rather than try to look at it logically, piece by piece. Looking at this specifically, for instance. The vast majority of claims we're bombarded with, whether we agree with them emotionally or not, are not even coherant enough to be wrong. The content of the speech is either purely emotional or it's rhetorical posturing. I don't think any of the Enlightenment thinkers, time traveling to 2019, would assert that you need to waste energy evaluating it all so long as you do spend some energy evaluating the things you take to heart. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 19:12
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