Posted on 04/07/2018 6:05:00 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
What, then, was “the Enlightenment”? This term was promoted, first and foremost, by the late-18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant . . . [who declared] that only reason allows human beings to emerge from their “self-incurred immaturity” by casting aside the “dogmas and formulas” of authority and tradition. For Kant, reason is universal, infallible and a priori—meaning independent of experience. As far as reason is concerned, there is one eternally valid, unassailably correct answer to every question in science, morality and politics . . .
This astonishing arrogance is based on a powerful idea: that mathematics can produce universal truths by beginning with self-evident premises . . . and then proceeding by means of infallible deductions to . . . “apodictic certainty.” Since this method worked in mathematics, Descartes had insisted, it could be applied to all other disciplines. The idea was subsequently taken up and refined by Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Rousseau as well as Kant.
This view of “reason”—and of its power, freed from the shackles of history, tradition and experience—is what Kant called “Enlightenment.” It is completely wrong. Human reason is incapable of reaching universally valid, unassailably correct answers to the problems of science, morality and politics by applying the methods of mathematics.
The first warning of this was Descartes’s 1644 magnum opus, “The Prnciples of Philosophy,” which claimed to reach a final determination of the nature of the universe by moving from self-evident premises through infallible deductions. This voluminous work is so scandalously absurd that no unabridged English version is in print today. Yet Descartes’s masterpiece took Europe by storm and for decades was the main textbook of the Cartesian school of science. Kant followed this dubious example . . . [by claiming] to have deduced Newton’s laws of motion using pure reason, without empirical evidence.
(Excerpt) Read more at paywallnews.com ...
The French conservative Alexis de Toqueville wrote the Ancien Regime - a masterful analysis of what led to the French Revolution.
Basically you had a decrepit old regime caught against rising demands for freedom, an end to unfair taxation and the special privileges enjoyed by the few in the Church and the aristocracy.
It couldn’t reform fast enough to meet those demands and when it refused the social and political pillars of its existence disappeared literally overnight.
Tocqueville is on the whole complimentary to it because as a middle class child, he would never been able to go as far as his ability and talents would have taken him under the Ancien Regime.
Without the French Revolution, its hard to see him ever have written his masterpiece, Democracy In America.
this is about as politely as I can put his; you are alarmingly uninformed on the subject in the revolution in france (and it’s actually a bit offensive that you attempt to compare it to the american revolution).
I believe there may be a few more works on the subject of the french revolution other than the one you read.
If all you’ve ever read about the French Revolution is Edmund Burke famous critique of it, well, he’s certainly right about its wretched and inexcusable excesses. Its also an argument for not judging an event from a contemporary pespective because you can’t see how the long term picture may turn out.
Tocqueville’s reading of it is very different because he lived a generation after it took place and his judgment of is more balanced. Posterity tends to side with Tocqueville over Burke and the proof is the French today live in a democratic and rule of law state.
Reminds of the philosopher Michael Polanyi and his theory of “tacit knowledge” which is summed up by his phrase “we know more than we can tell”. From this he deduces a conservative political philosophy.
asserting who’s “side” has been picked by “posterity” is pompous, fatuous, and, as you may recall, a famous obamite verbal mind trick — his opponents were always “on the wrong side of history”. it was always particularly annoying.
look, if you want to live in a fetishistic delusion of the terror, and an absolute misunderstanding of the political and historical disasters (plural) that immediately followed, and were caused by, the french revolution, then go with God.
but it’s a bit twisted to admire a violent revolt that descended into chaos, created a republic that barely lasted ten years, and let to Bonaparte and the entire european continent at war.
This post reminds me of a song by Monty Python:
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable,
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table,
David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya ‘bout the turning of the wrist,
Socrates himself was permanently pissed...
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, with half a pint of shandy was particularly ill,
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day,
Aristotle, Aristotle was a beggar for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, “I drink therefore I am.”
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed.
...The Enlightenment’s strict emphasis on Reason as the only way to comprehend the universe..."
"...the only way to comprehend..."
That is the root of what is wrong with everything the Left loves about the Enlightenment.
Freedom, religious conscience, the right to do anything the law does not forbid and the capacity of people to pursue their abilities and talents irrespective of their station in life - those where the ideals the French Revolution brought forth and they can be defended on their merits as liberal and democratic in nature.
I can see why it was necessary while having no problem condemning the 1917 Russian Revolution. If it does not benefit humanity, its not worth defending.
I get the importance of reason; without it, we’re pitiless fanatics devoid of humanity.
What liberals forget is man cannot thrive without faith in God and understanding life is a mystery.
Humility is hard for human beings to learn - that is why we need faith to temper the arrogance of unbounded reason.
It is that sweet spot where emotion is balanced with reason that results in decisions and responses that are good for the individual and society.
what you’re selling here is pretty close to propaganda. I’m going to assume that you are either willfully ignorant on the subject, cannot admit that you’re so ridiculously wrong, or have some other personal ax to grind. irrespective, you’re flirting with absurdity.
your naive, romantic notions of one of the most undemocratic, authoritarian, senseless, and soul crushing episodes of wanton human savagery in history cries out for correction. I sincerely hope you find it. this is a big one to have so incredibly wrong.
I prefer freedom to fanaticism, conscience over conformity and free workers over serfs.
The old medieval French order embodied all the latter. It took a vast upheaval to sweep it away.
In the end, people had a voice, they could worship God as they wanted and they were not bound to the land in thrall to their masters.
Did the French Revolution have its sins? Of course but sometimes humanity can only advance by throwing off the shackles of the past.
When one considers whom the French Revolution emancipated: intellectuals, businesspeople, workers, peasants, Protestants and Jews, I find that alone is much to admire about it.
the french revolution didn’t “emancipate” anyone. it enslaved them to a different master. it also left them in even more hopeless and grinding poverty, and it significantly extended the timeline before they had any hope of eventual deliverance.
you’re talking a lot about God this Sunday; but you don’t seem to understand that it was also not only NOT about religious freedom, it quickly mutated into enforced atheism. government itself, the state, became a diety to the lunatics driving the french revolution.
I wish there was a less harsh way of saying this, but, in this particular case, at least, you have no idea what you’re talking about before you start writing pretty sentences. so you write pretty sentences full of tragically wrong information.
There was Robespierre and the Jacobins who enforced their notion of revolutionary purity on others but they were in the end consumed by their own violence.
You’re right it took a long time for democracy and individual freedom to take root but once the French Revolution was purged of its radical excesses it became a banner for liberal democracy in Europe and elsewhere.
It gave people hope they didn’t have before and even if the ideals they dreamt about couldn’t happen for them, it could happen for their children and grandchildren.
We’ll agree to disagree about the French Revolution but the lesson for me is as long people rise and fight for freedom, it will never die in the hearts of men.
When I go there, no pay wall. Interesting.It’s still behind a pay wall. Thank you for posting it though.
Spooky, almost. I tried your link successfully once, then failed trying to repeat it. Note that I am a dead-tree WSJ subscriber, which is how I came to know about the article in the first place. That theoretically gives me some online access, but not the whole magilla online. And I am not logged in. I think.
dead people can’t hope, and the only consistent product of the french revolution was mountains and mountains of dead people. dead of starvation, dead of disease, dead from violence, dead from the guillotine, and dead at the hands of their “fellow revolutionaries”.
it was a virulent social infection that required generations to recover from. it may have even been more traumatic upon the collective french psyche than the nazis, and that really is saying something.
other than french apologists and addled liberal utopian snake handlers, I’ve never encountered anyone who defended french revolutionaries for their (and it makes my skin crawl just to type this) humanity.
Google a sentence from the story, make sure you’ve located the right story in the Google news index, and click the Google link. Online publications don’t subject their Google referrals to their paywall; it wrecks their site analytics.
This view of “reason”—and of its power, freed from the shackles of history, tradition and experience—is what Kant called “Enlightenment.” It is completely wrong. Human reason is incapable of reaching universally valid, unassailably correct answers to the problems of science, morality and politics by applying the methods of mathematics.
...
Wasn’t it Kurt Gödel, a theist, who established that?
His name crossed my mind, too. So I just now searched up and found:What is Godel's Theorem?It’s a short, approachable article, which I oversimplify (probably) as saying that back in 1931 Gödel assumed a digital computer of infinite speed but capable only of integer arithmetic. And showed that problems had to exist which it could never solve - and even if the first problem problem were stipulated to be true (or stipulated to be false), another problem problem must inevitably spring up to replace it. And that the program wired to stipulate the initial problem problem False would give different results and raise different problems than the same program wired to stipulate the initial problem problem True.This was a scandal in 1931, and mathematicians hoped to find a loophole. But in later years math luminaries including Touring dashed those hopes. It is settled science.
Come to think of it, tho, I wonder if quantum computing could in principle alter Godel’s conclusion???
Man without reason is rudderless and at the mercy of events.
Man without God is damned.
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