I see I haven’t posted on this thread in 9 days…
and why?
well, as quite often happens, life…between my shitty job, my wife having minor
surgery, she is fine, but I have been taking care of her for the last few days…
and life in general…
I have and we as a species, sometimes gets so involved in our lives, we
forget to stop and “smell the roses” as it were…who has time to think about
what it means to be human when life is rushing at us at warp speed…
I have been studying Heidegger… long before I had actually planned in
doing so…I just sort of fell into it… I am taking Heidegger as the
quintessential 20th century philosopher… now, should I?
I don’t know, but I am going to go for it…
but in thinking about Heidegger, I have been forced to think about
the “themes” of various philosophical era’s… for example, we can see
that the main philosophical “theme” of just about every philosopher from
Descartes to Kant, was the “theme” of epistemology, the theory of knowledge…
what can we know, how can we know it, what are the limits of our knowledge…
and if you think about it, then it makes sense… think about the time period
that Descartes lived in… he lived from 1596 to 1650… think of the scientific
advances that occurred before and during those years…if you live in a
scientific age like Descartes did, then understanding the limits of knowledge
makes sense…what can we know… so we know that Kepler lived from
1571 to 1630 and he was a key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution…
and one of the other key figures was Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543…
he changed the ideal of the solar system from being earth centric to being sun centric…
and Galilei lived from 1564 to 1642… see how this revolution in science lead
to philosophers being interested in the limits of knowledge…and Isaac Newton lived
from 1642 to 1726…the turn in science lead philosophers to wonder about
the limits of knowledge…quite a logical deduction to go from the limits of science
to the limits of knowledge at large…
now the next fact to keep in mind is the next age in philosophy,
which was the “Age of enlightenment” and what the key phrase of
the enlightenment? It is “Sapere aude” which is “dare to know”
we can see with science that the concept of “Sapere aude” was front
and center… it could have been the motto of science too…
the engagement of philosophers in the enlightenment was to stretch the motto
of “sapere aude” from science proper to everything we consider to be human…
the enlightenment dared to know about everything from politics to philosophy
to economics to history to what we today would call sociology…
the enlightenment took the scientific belief in daring to know, into
fields never before explored…so in my mind, the scientific revolution
and the enlightenment are simple two sides of the same coin… one
went into science and the study of natural elements and the other
took the advances of science and applied that to human elements like
philosophy and medicine and politics and history and economics…
recall that Adam Smith published his book “The wealth of Nations” in
1776… during the “enlightenment”… it was an writing of the enlightenment
as was the Declaration of Independence… a political treatise…
the next theme we reach is the age of Romanticism…which was a
artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement toward the end
of the enlightenment, the end of the 18th century and was at its peak
from 1800 to 1850…
Romanticism has been considered to a be a reaction to the ongoing
Industrial Revolution, the scientific rationalization of nature
and the aristocratic social and political norms of the age of enlightenment…
for the most part those who participated in the enlightenment were
“Gentlemen” with the notable exception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau…
and one of the main reactions of Romanticism was the democratization of
ideals… the main figures of the Romantic era wasn’t the noble class of the
previous age… think of Shakespeare, think of the people who were in his
plays… kings, nights, royalty, the higher class of people… those who weren’t
in this high class played supporting roles in Shakespeare plays… they were never
main players, only the upper class got attention in Shakespeare…
for example, in the most famous novel ever written, Don Quixote,
the lead character, was a nobleman…and this was common…
the lead characters in plays, novels, poems, until the Romantic era,
was the upper class…
are there exceptions? of course, Tom Jones for example was about a youth who
wasn’t a a noble but in fact, does turn out to be the son of a wealthy Squire…
a squire was a country gentleman of wealth…the other very well known novel
of the 18 century was Robinson Crusoe…who wasn’t of the upper class…
but this was a novel of the enlightenment… and that is apparent by
his reaction to the native cannibals…read the book…anyway…
anyway, we are still living in great part, in the Romantic age…
More later…
Kropotkin