Transcript The Enlightenment an Introduction

The Enlightenment an
Introduction
The Rise of Enlightenment: The
Political History
 Middle Ages: Feudal System and the
Tyranny of the Church
 Renaissance: Increased Freedom
 End of the early modern period in
England: Henry to Elizabeth to James I
 1649 Beheading of Charles I and the Puritan
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Commonwealth
1649-1658 Cromwell and his son
1660 Restoration: Charles II, the Anglican’s and
Parliament
1688 The Glorious Revolution: Parliament
(apparently both the Wigs and Tories) decide to get
rid of James II and invite William of Orange to
invade England
1689 William (a Hanover) cooperates with
Parliament and the Declaration of Rights establishes
English constitutional government
Rise of Enlightenment:
Intellectual History
 1517 Reformation begins in Germany with Luther’s
95 theses challenging the practice of indulgences
 1524 Erasmus writes De Libero Arbitrio (On Free
Will)
 Throughout the 16th century Humanism spreads
over Europe along with interest in scientific inquiry;
availability of books increases literacy
 1543 Copernicus writes On the Revolution of
Celestial Bodies
Intellectual History Con’t
 1580 Montaigne writes his first Essays
 1611 Authorized (King James) version of the Bible
 1620 Francis Bacon writes Novum Organum--this
important work aimed to break science away from
the grip of Aristotelian causality and syllogistic logic
while at the same time warning against untested
hypothesis
 1630’s Galileo is tried and condemned for his writing
 1641 Descartes writes Meditations--this
is really the birth of the human subject
that will be theorized throughout the
18th century and through today
 1651 Hobbes writes Leviathan
 1690 Locke writes Concerning Human
Understanding
Enlightenment: Literary
History
 The Neo-Classical Pole
 Satire
 Couplets
 Political uses of Wit
 Decorum and Polite Literature
 Sensibility Pole
 Odes and Personal Lyrics
 Introspective and Withdrawn
 Increasingly Organic
Isaiah Berlin’s Three Principles of
Enlightenment
(1) all genuine questions can be answered, that is, if a question cannot be
answered it is not a question (21). There is no hiding behind God or
religion or tradition or mystery. We may be too weak or stupid too get
the answer, but there is an answer or there is something wrong with the
question.
 (2) All answers are knowable and the methods by which they are known
can be discovered and taught to others (22).
 (3) All answers must be compatible with one another--that is that all
knowledge is subject to the law of non-contradiction and answers must
present logical truths. We are on our way to the Utopian world of the
Enlightenment (22).
 Implication:
 What Enlightenment did to these principles that makes them particular
to Enlightenment and not simply the Western tradition, is it rejected the
old ways of knowing--i.e. revelation, dogma, tradition, individual selfinspection--and grounded all knowledge in the "correct use of reason,
deductively as in the mathematical sciences, inductively as in the sciences
of nature" (22). Enlightenment triumphantly extended reason to the
fields of politics, ethics, and aesthetics.
Peter Gay The Rise of Modern Paganism
and The Science of Freedom
 The Little Flock of Philosophes
 "The men of the Enlightenment united on a vastly ambitions program, a
program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above
all, freedom in its many forms--freedom from arbitrary power, freedom
of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one's talents, freedom of
aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his won
way in the world" (3).
 "The philosophic family was drawn together by the demand of political
strategy, by the hostility of church and state, and by the struggle to
enhance the prestige and increase the income of literary men. But the
cohesion among the phiosophes went deeper than this: behind their
tactical alliances and personal fellowship there stood a common
experience from which they constructed a coherent philosophy. This
experience--which marked each of the philosophes with greater or lesser
intensity, but which marked they all--was the dialectical interplay of their
appeal to antiquity, their tension with Christianity, and their pursuit of
modernity" (8).
Enlightenment: Breaking up the
Unity
 By the 1970’s the focus in Enlightenment studies
was less on assessing the relative merits of
individual thinkers, and more concentrated on the
social use, dissemination and reaction to these ideas
and ideals
 H.F. May, A. Owen Aldridge, Franco Venturi, and
Robert Darnton all shifted the methodological
approach to Enlightenment studies. However, it was
Adorno and Horkheimer that really changed the way
people thought about the dark-side of
Enlightenment
 Finally, Habermas, a second generation
Frankfurt school sociologist, tried to
recover some of the pieces left in the
wake of Adorno and Horkheimer, in
order to theorize a Communicative
Action based on Communicative Ethics
The Dialectic of
Enlightenment
“With the spread of the bourgeois commodity
economy the dark horizon of myth is
illuminated by the sun of calculating reason,
beneath whose icy rays the seeds of the new
barbarism are germinating”
General Background
 Frankfurt Institute of Social Theory
Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Weber,
Herbert Marcuse, etc.
 Oil and Water: Two very serious Geman
refugee/philosophers in the Jazz Age
era of Pacific Palisades in the 1940’s
Basic Argument of the Philosophical
Fragments
 “That the hygienic factory and everything
pertaining to it, Volkswagen and the sports palace,
are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not
matter in itself, but that these things are
themselves becoming metaphysics, an ideological
curtain, within the social whole, behind which real
doom is gathering does matter. . . . our analysis is
directed at the claim objectively contained in [the
culture industry’s] products to be aesthetic
formations and thus representations of truth”
(xviii). Los Angeles 1944
Key Terms:
 The primary dialectic in the Dialectic of Enlightenment--
the binary Myth/Power
 Reification--the conversion of things into objects--more
often than not objects that have exchange-value
 Identical--the condition of human beings under the
reigning paradigm of science and the logic of noncontradiction. The ontology of humanity in the identical
is reducible to a factor of one
 Non-identical--the possibility of seeing one’s
artifactuality as such and choosing to turn away from the
logic of non-contradiction. It is to see oneself in
radically different and open, what Adorno will later call
an autonomous agent
The Basic Argument in Three
Parts
 Part One: Man, through Enlightenment, became the
master of the universe but had to pay the price of
estrangement from the objects (nature) that he now
lorded over
 Part Two: The myth of Enlightenment logic, the
knowledge that gave birth to the subject as a
powerful orderer, also estranged man from himself
 Part Three: Once the Enlightenment is shown to be
a dialectic of Myth/Power that smashes all diversity
vis-à-vis non-contradiction and the principle of
identity, its terrific grip can be combated (maybe)
Part One: The Dialectic Man/Nature
 The methodology of Enlightenment
 “It [Enlightenment] wanted to dispel myths, to
overthrow fantasy with knowledge” (1). However,
“the “happy match” between human understanding and
the nature of things that [Bacon] envisaged is a
patriarchal one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to
rule over disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is
power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of
creation or in its deference to worldly masters. . .
.Technology is the essence of this knowledge” (2).
 So, Enlightenment sought to control nature by learning the
mechanisms that had scared people into superstition and
myth
 “What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to
dominate wholly both it and human beings” (2). The power half of
the dialectic
 The problem with this theory/invention of history,
according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is that it was just
that, an invention of Enlightenment in order to control and
justify--a myth invented to cover a myth
 This is why Adorno and Horkheimer argue that what
Enlightenment really saw in Myth was itself--the
power to control. This is the Mythic half.
The Birth of the Subject
 In order to control nature Enlightenment needed a a
methodology and a controller
 “Formal logic was the high school of unification” because “it offered
Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world calculable” and ultimately
reducible to one (4).
 But…
 The drive to quantify and reduce to the law of non-contradiction meant that, “From
now on, being is split between logos—which, with the advance of philosophy,
contracts to a monad, a mere reference point—and the mass of things and creatures
in the external world. The single distinction between man’s own existence and
reality swallows up all others” (5). This is the mythic dialectic of Enlightenment—
and it came with a high price.
 The substitution of the subject for God had a price
 “The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power as the
principle of all relationships” (5).
 There can be no other if the whole of possible identity is absorbed in
the overarching concept of the subject. Ironically it is at the birth of
the subject—perhaps the apogee of Enlightenment disenchantment—
that the Enlightenment reveals itself to be mythological. The allencompassing subject replaces the omnipotent god of religion and the
transcendental Absolute of conceptual philosophy; thus
Enlightenment’s power to rid the world of backwardness of belief
ironically reproduces a metaphysics of belief in the form of a universal
subject that orders and commands the world of nature.
Part Two:The Process of Identification and
Estrangement from Self
 Once Enlightenment had created the subject and
the object under the sway of logic, it was only a
short step to the total estrangement of the self
from itself--the machinery of logic simply
continues to crush opposition to non-contradiction
 “Enlightenment finally devoured not only symbols but
also their successors, universal concepts, and left
nothing of metaphysics behind except the abstract fear
of the collective from which it has sprung” (17).
 In the conceptual place of metaphysics Enlightenment
resorts to mathematics.
 “Enlightenment regresses to the mythology it has never been able
to escape. For mythology had reflected in its forms the essence of
the existing order—cyclical motion, fate, domination of the world
as truth—and had renounced hope” (20).
 But Enlightenment doesn’t stop there
 “Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the
machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by
the machine” (19).
 “Reason serves as the universal tool for the fabrication of all other
tools, rigidly purpose-directed and as calamitous as the precisely
calculated operations of material production, the results of which
for human beings escape all calculation” (23).
 In short, Enlightenment’s scientistic epistemology (an invention
of man) becomes the new God and man becomes subject to his
own creation. As such, he is alienated from himself, that is, the
thought processes that define him under the regime of
Enlightenment
 “Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of
human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships
of human beings, including the relationship of individuals to
themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the
objectification of mind. . . . Animism had endowed things with
souls; industrialism makes souls into things. . . . Individuals
define themselves now only as things, statistical elements,
successes or failures. Their criterion is self-preservation,
successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their
function and the schemata assigned to it” (21-22).
Part Three: The Return of the Nonidentical
 What might be a way out the the dialectic of
Enlightenment?
 In order to maintain the myth of Enlightenment,
Enlightenment must continually resort to the “horror of
myth” in order to preserve order (24).
 That is, “Mimetic, mythical, and metaphysical forms of behavior
were successively regarded as stages of world history which had
been left behind, and the idea of reverting to them held the terror
that the self would be changed back into the mere nature from
which it had extricated itself with unspeakable exertions and which
for that reason filled it with unspeakable dread” (24).
 “Humanity” according to Adorno and
Horkheimer, “had to inflict terrible injuries on
itself before the self—the identical, purposedirected, masculine character of human beings—
was created” (26).
 So the return to the non-identical, a return to the
natural state of man, may be possible. It begins
with a return to aesthetics. However, in this case
aesthetics is not as a mode of judgment per se, but
rather a refusal to pass judgment on the mimetic.
Was ist Aufklärung?
Kant’s Response to a deceptively
Simple Question
The Context of the Question
 In 1780 Fredrick the Great directed the Berlin
Academy of Sciences to offer an award for the best
essay addressing the question: “Is it expedient to
deceive the people”
 In 1783 the Berlin newspaper Berlinische
Monatsschrift solicited responses to one of the most
pressing political questions of the day: What is
Enlightenment?
 Prussia may have had an “enlightened monarch” in
Fredrick the great, but anxiety about unrestricted
inquiry coming into conflict with the establishment
and maintenance of a stable social order ruled the
day
Some Responses:
 Gothold Lessing--German dramatist
 Moses Mendelssohon--Jewish
philosopher
 But the most famous was Kant’s
The basic thesis: Enlightenment is a
process
 Part One: “Enlightenment is man’s
release from his self-incurred
tutelage….Sapere aude! ‘Have courage
to exercise your own understanding!’-that is the motto of the
Enlightenment” (30).
 Part Two:“‘Do we live in an
enlightened age?’ the answer is, ‘No’”,
but we do live in an age of
Enlightenment” (33).
Part One: Liberation
 Problem One: “Laziness and cowardice”
 “If I have a book which understands for me, a
pastor who has a conscious for me, a physician
who decides my diet…If I can only pay--others
will readily undertake the irksome work [of
thinking for myself] for me” (30).
 Problem Two: Man, by unnatural forces has
become incapable of using his reason.
 “Statues and formulas, those mechanical tools of
the rational employment or rather misemployment of his natural gifts, are the fetters
of an everlasting tutelage” (30).
Kant’s Solution
 The first step is freedom
 “If only freedom is granted, enlightenment will follow” (30).
 However, unrestrained freedom can cause serious obstacles to
Enlightenment.
 “Perhaps a decrease in personal despotism and of avaricious or
tyrannical oppression may be accomplished by revolution, but
never a true reform in ways of thinking. Rather, new prejudices
will serve as well as old ones to harness the great thoughtless
masses” (31).
 What kind of freedom then?
 “freedom of the most harmless sort among its various definitions:
freedom to make public use of one’s reason” (my emphasis 31).
Public and Private Use of Reason:
“Argue as much as you will, and
about what you will, by obey!”
(31).
 Public Use of Reason, “must always be free,
and it alone can bring about enlightenment
among men” (31).
 It is the “use which a person makes of it as a
scholar before the reading public” (31).
 Examples are the solder, scholar, clergyman, or
citizen who, “through his writings…can argue
without hurting the affairs for which he is in part
responsible as a passive member” (31).
 Private use of reason, on the other hand, “may be
very narrowly restricted without particularly
hindering the process of enlightenment” (31).
 It is “that which one may make of it in a particular civil
post or office which is entrusted to him….some members of
the community must passively conduct themselves with an
official unanimity, so that the government may direct them
to public ends, or at least prevent them from destroying
those ends” (31).
 Thus, obedience. “The citizen cannot refuse to pay
taxes…a clergyman is obligated to make his
sermon…conform to the symbol of the church which he
serves” etc. (31).
Enlightenment: A Critical Public
Philosophy that Brings the Public and
Private together
 “The use, therefore, which an appointed
teacher makes of his reason before his
congregation is merely private, because this
congregation is only a domestic one…with
respect to it, as a priest, he is not free, nor
can he be free, because he carries out the
orders of another. But as a scholar, whose
writings speak to his true public, the world,
the clergyman in the public use of his reason
enjoys an unlimited freedom to use his own
reason and to speak in his own person” (32).
Some Implications, Conclusions, and
Questions
 The Political Paradox: “A prince who does not find it unworthy
of himself to say that he holds it to be his duty to prescribe
nothing to men in religious matters…[is] the first, at least from
the side of government, who divested the human race of its
tutelage and left each man free to make use of his reason in
matter of conscience” (33).
 However, “only one who is himself enlightened, is not afraid of
shadows, and who has a numerous and well-disciplined army to
assure peace, can say: ‘Argue as much as you will, and about
what you will, only obey!’”
 The Nationalist Implication: “This spirit of freedom spreads
beyond this land, even to those in which it must struggle with
external obstacles erected by a government which
misunderstands it own interest” (34).
Kant’s Paradox of Enlightenment
 “A greater degree of civil freedom appears advantageous to the
freedom of mind of the people, and yet it places inescapable
limitations upon it; a lower degree of civil freedom, on the
contrary, provides the mind with room for each man to extend
himself to his full capacity” (34).
Discussion Questions:
 Do you believe Kant’s thesis about the nature of public and
private reason?
 Do you buy Kant’s version of Enlightenment as a legitimate
political and social structure?
 Can or should man maintain a split personality in order to
preserve the socio-political order until the whole of mankind
has become enlightened to such an extent that they no longer
need any reason to perpetuate the split?
 What are some of the long-term effects, both positive and
negative of such a strategy?
 Finally, What does this all have to do with art and aesthetics?