The Enlightenment an Introduction

The Rise of Enlightenment: The Political History

Middle Ages: Feudal System and the Tyranny of the Church

Renaissance: Increased FreedomEnd of the early modern period in

England: Henry to Elizabeth to James I

1649 Beheading of Charles I and the Puritan 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 Leviathan1690 Locke writes Concerning

Human Understanding

Enlightenment: Literary History

The Neo-Classical PoleSatireCoupletsPolitical uses of WitDecorum and Polite Literature

Sensibility PoleOdes and Personal LyricsIntrospective and WithdrawnIncreasingly 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 self-inspection--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 TheoryAdorno, 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 non-contradiction. 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 all-encompassing 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 Non-identical

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, purpose-directed, 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: LiberationProblem 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 mis-employment 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?