Enlightenment: or why is it attacked so often

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
21

Your argument is based on the fact that they didn’t
refer to themselves as an “enlightenment movement”
and that is basically your only argument…

they didn’t refer to themselves as that, in England
but the problem is a lot of people were afraid to come out and admit,
to be part of a movement in which members of that movement were punished,
with jail or even death… noticed how some writers like Descartes
and Spinoza were very quiet about how they referred to things…
they didn’t say out loud they were trying to change the world…
they were circumspect about their writings…and in England,
you have the same issue… being called a “Spinozist”
was a dangerous thing in England, France, and even the Netherlands,
little more dangerous in countries like Spain or Italy or the many countries
of Germany… if a belief will get one tossed into prison, one
doesn’t advertise it… and that is why you don’t get people
boasting or bragging about being part of the Enlightenment movement…
it could mean going to prison… why advertise?

you are basing your theory that people were quite willing to say that
they favored certain idea’s and thoughts, but the fact is, if those idea’s
and thoughts might bring about prison, you are going to be much quieter
or even silent about it…think about the period of time that they are writing
in and their silence makes much more sense…

Kropotkin

22

Who are “THEY”?
Your only argument is that “THEY” were in some kind of movement, which had key values.
Well let me tell you “THEY” (whoever the fuck they are) did not share key values, and did not recognise themseloves as being in any kind of movement.
If you think otherwise then show me the money.

No one at any time or any place ever referred to themselves that way.
Prove they did!

SHow me where anyone shared these “key values”

23

Enlightenment could be identified exactly with a series of autonomous ideas: it cannot. There never was any agreement as to what the Enlightenment was or whether it was possible to make it conform to a clear set of ideas. But is it clear that the seeds of that obscurity can be found not in the late twentieth century but in the middle of the twentieth century, between the works of Cassirer on the one hand and the likes of Manuel and Berlin[ Berlin’s The Age of Enlightenment (1956), and Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1955)] on the other, at the very moment that ‘Enlightenment’ is introduced. These distinct approaches lie at opposite ends of a conceptual spectrum: in the very use of the term which is used as if the Enlightenment were a causal agent by Cassirer, but only as a label for a period of philosophical history by Berlin and Manuel.

24

as I am otherwise engaged today, football playoffs, GO 49’S
and the Warriors are playing later today, I shall be
watching sports the rest of the day… I will return,
with luck, tomorrow…

Kropotkin

25

Fuck off don’t take it the wrong way.
Read the fucking thing - you cleaarly have not bothered.
This was the result of reading books (have you read a book recently?) .
And it is well cited. I am n ot the only historian that has noted this about the E.

The problem is that you haven’t done the fucking research.
A first class Masters essay is research - so fuck off or read the essay.

26

Yeah - fuck off, avoid the tricky questions and be like all the other Sunday morons and watch the football.

27

_
I’ve always pondered the question… enlightenment for the purpose of what?

Who does it ultimately benefit?

28

Enlightenment is about recovering the ageless technology of wisdom.

Happiness without self hatred.

Sadists cannot find this happiness.

They are facades of a person.

Enlightenment is actually extremely rare.

29

We are not talking about that sort of enlightenment, but “The Enlightenment” the prosopsed post hoc , defined historiographical phenomenon that was supposed to have brought us everything wonderful from freedom, fair wages, sexual emancipation, the end to slavery, pretty bunnies, and lovely cuddly puppies.

30

Oh. You mean the movement that resurrected Ancient Greece and the scientific method.

Without actual enlightenment .,. It’s meaningless.

31

No. That is usually called the Renaissance.

It seems that since the end of the Darkages, we have been going through the historical periods called the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the unnamed 19th-20th Centruries and have been happily progressing in arts and science, either with or without your ideosyncratic view of “enlightenment”.
So either the rest of the human race is way ahead of you, or you are just wrong. - or both.

32

That ‘unnamed’ period you refer to is the Industrial Age, the modern age, postmodern age, and the next was the Information Age …

By the way, I’m way ahead of you, we only have one more age to go…

The age of consent. It’s what all the other ages have been building up towards … where people think deeply about the concept of consent, how it works and what it means to us.

Consent structures define us. Without one, there is no us. The next age will be people considering what is or isn’t helpful on this spectrum, and whether they are capable of change even if they agree that something is helpful and what to do about it.

33

You’ve heard of “boo” “yeah” theory, right?

People either “boo” something or they cheer for it.

Everyone on this board does it.

That’s your consent structure.

Some people try to be tricky by saying that they’re neutral.

As they say, the mundanity of evil, evil through non participation.

My entire body of work on this board singularly maps the entire age of consent.

Instead of me being wrong (sure, I still make slight mistakes (like confusing the renaissance with the enlightenment - which is a laughable mistake btw)

But I’ve done all the work for our next age.

34

You’re all still stuck in the old ways. Dinosaurs.

Living dinosaurs.

Can you adapt?

The next age is me.

There might be an AI age in between.

I’m the final age.

35

um yes-- you are both

36

Hmm… should we violate Sculptor’s consent forever?

Maybe just 1 minute? Without laying a finger on him.

Maybe then, he might understand the dinosaur he is.

37

K: I must say, I thought we were having a gentle discussion about
the Enlightenment and here we are… with me getting a “fuck off”…

My only ‘‘crime’’ as far as I can tell is that I didn’t immediately concede to your
‘‘obvious and superior scholarship’’ I wasn’t aware that you need everyone
to concede to your highly advanced, world class education (it confuses me that with such
advance scholarship that you would slum it, with us clearly inferior human beings)

Now I was quite pleased to engage in a pleasant discussion
about the nature and scope of the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ but I am far too old
to engage in whatever this has become (and it certainly isn’t pleasant)
so, I shall concede whatever you want me to concede to, as to avoid the
unpleasantness you have brought into this thread… BTW the 49’s
won their game and the Warriors lost… such is the way of life…
or are going to tell me to ‘‘fuck off’’ again?

Kropotkin

38

Peter Kropotkin: As defined by Jonathan Israel, the Enlightenment principles are
as such:

Democracy;
racial and sexual equality;
individual liberty of lifestyle;
full freedom of thought, expression, and the press;
eradication of religious authority from the legislative
and education;
and full separation of church and state…

K: Part of my “complaint” is the fact that we still are fighting for those
ideals of the Enlightenment… It wasn’t until the end the “Enlightenment”
period that people spoke out against slavery… historically, it was first from
the Churchmen/ reverends and the like, that spoke out against slavery…
and it moved out from there… in the “Slave trade Act of 1807”
that started the movement toward ending slavery in the UK… Which
happened in 1833/34…couldn’t have happened without the philosophies
of the “Enlightenment”… which is more than 100 years after the Enlightenment
movement began…but the fact is that from the time of the “mental revolution”
the mental changes needed to begin the physical process of change… in other words,
once we begin to think we might be doing something wrong, it takes time
for us to overcome that thinking… there is a lag between our thoughts and our
actions…One day, I might conclude that drinking is bad for me, but it might
take me years before I actually act upon that…that is the type of lag I am
talking about…

the Enlightenment is about a mental revolution that clearly has, in some
instances we still haven’t come to grips with it, but it takes years to go from
a mental revolution to physical action…an example of this is look at
how long it took from the time that Copernicus wrote his book posting
that the Sun was the center of the universe and not the earth, look at
how long that took to take effect… hundreds of years…
that type of lag time is present in everything we do…
for example, we have yet come to grips with the theory of
relativity or what E= Mc2 means for us, not just scientifically,
but social, economically, politically or philosophically…
the Atomic Bomb was first exploded in 1945 and we still haven’t come
to terms with that or that the Holocaust was from, roughly 1938-1945,
80 years ago, and we still haven’t come to terms with that either…

and so, we still are fighting battles that we have engaged with mentally,
decades if not centuries ago, but because of the lag time, we are still fighting
those century old battles…
the fact is we’ve had two centuries of commentary about the industrial
revolution and we still haven’t come to grips with that one either…
I am hardly the first to criticize and by no means will I be the last,
but until we overcome our lag time in how we think about the Industrial
Revolution, I shall continue the drumbeat against the Industrial revolution…

the battle of the Enlightenment isn’t about a physical reaction to it,
it is first and foremost, a mental response to the ill-effects of the
Industrial revolution… and until we are mentally ready, we cannot begin
the battle to overcome the very real and massive damage the Industrial
Revolution has cause to us, physically, socially, mentally and psychologically…
it is not the physical battle of the Enlightenment, it is a mental battle,
a mental revolution as it were…to overcome the what the Enlightenment movement
has brought to light… the dangers as it were…

Kropotkin

39

A Henri-Frederic Amiel once wrote about the entire
industrial process, mid 19th century,

" To crush what is spiritual, moral, human in man by specializing him;
to form mere wheels of great social machine instead of complete
individuals; to make society and not conscience the center of life, to
enslave the soul to things, to depersonalize man-this is the dominant
drift of the age’’ I found this in “Freedom in the Modern world” by
Herbert J. Muller

and we can note that by the word “society” he meant the business world,
not our selves or our individual souls…

if we are to free ourselves of our self-induced “bondage” that is
installed into us, as indoctrinations from birth, we must first discover,
learn what those indoctrination are… hence the constant
drive I hold to one self-overcoming by an attack upon one’s values
and beliefs… it is by holding values and beliefs that were installed into
us as children, even babies, are in part, what has held us in “bondage”
our own personally held beliefs like there is a god, or America is
the greatest nation on earth… these are beliefs that are not our own,
but have been indoctrinated into us and freedom, true freedom comes
from us having a reevaluation of values which explore what values/beliefs
are actually our values/beliefs… and not the values/beliefs installed into us…

that is, in part, the point of the “Enlightenment” to escape our indoctrinations
of childhood to becoming values and beliefs that actually reflect who we are today,
currently, as of this moment…hence, existence is on-going engagement with
our own personal reevaluations of values… are the values/beliefs I hold today,
are they actually my own values/beliefs or are they values/beliefs installed into
me by friends, family, the state, the corporation, the church, society… which
values/beliefs actually represent who I am, not who the state/society/family/
society/ want me to be? and that is what the “Enlightenment” actually means…
to become who we are by a reevaluation of values and a reflection of
what, who, how and why we are, who we are…

Kropotkin

40

But Peter,

You can always pull an iambiguous:

Because someone has a different value, no values exist.

Because I wasn’t perfect out of the womb, nobody is perfect.

Because I was wrong one time, nobody can be right.