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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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