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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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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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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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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. I
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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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