Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2006) ("From the outset then, in the late seventeenth century, there were always two enlightenments. Neither the historian nor the philosopher is likely to get very far with discussing 'modernity' unless he or she starts by differentiating Radical Enlightenment from conservative--or as it is called in this study--moderate mainstream Enlightenment. For the difference between reason alone and reason combined with faith and tradition was a ubiquitous and absolute difference. Philosophically, 'modernity' conceived as an abstract package of basic values--toleration, personal freedom, democracy, equality racial and sexual, freedom of expression, sexual emancipation, and the universal right to knowledge and 'enlightenment'--derives . . . from just one of these two, namely the Radical Enlightenment; historically, however, 'modernity' is the richly nuanced brew which arose as a result of the ongoing conflict not just between these two enlightenments but also (or still more) between enlightenments, on the one hand, and, on the other, the successive counter-enlightenments, beginning with Bossuet and culminating n the Postmodernism rejecting all these principles and seeking to overthrow both streams of Enlightenment. Rousseau, initially in the late 1740s and early 1750s and ally of Diderot and a radical philosophe, subsequently, in the 1760s, rebelled against both branches of Enlightenment, becoming the moral 'prophet' as it were of one form of Counter-Enlightenment." "Of the two enlightenments, the moderate mainstream was without doubt overwhelmingly dominant in terms of support, official approval, and prestige practically everywhere except for several decades in France from the 1740s onwards. Nevertheless, in a deeper sense, and in the long run, it proved to be much the less important of the two enlightenments. For it was always fatally hampered by its Achilles heel, namely that all its philosophical recipes for blending theological and traditional categories with the new critical mathematical rationality proved flawed in practice, not to say highly problematic and shot through with contradictions, Cartesian dualism, Lockean empiricism, Leibnizian monads, Malebranche's occasionalism, Bishop Huet's fideism, the London Boyle Lectures, Newtonian physicotheology, Thomasian eclecticism, German and Swedish Wolffianism, all the methodologies of compromise presented insuperable disjunctions and difficulties, rendering the whole philosophico-scientific-scholarly arena after 1650 exceedingly fraught and unstable." "The radical wing who scorned all such dualistic systems, and attempts at adjustment, may have been a tiny fringe in terms of numbers status, and approval ratings, among both elites and in popular culture, but they proved impossible to dislodge or overwhelm intellectually. . . ." Id. at 11. "The present modish preference among teachers and students for the 'cultural' and the 'social; over the intellectual in the core mechanics of history may owe much to the, for some, appealing implications there is no need to bother one's head with complex ideas supposedly the concern only of small and remote elites. But this kind of anti-intellectualism, however many eager converts it wins, does so at great cost: for it is often rendered the 'diffusionists' either willing or . . . unwilling allies of the Postmodern campaign to discredit traditional methods of historical criticism and marginalize, and cast a negative light on, the Enlightenment itself." Id. at 22. "Among the most divisive and potentially perplexing of all basic concepts introduced by the Radical Enlightenment into the make-up of modernity, and one of most revolutionary in its implications, was, and is, the idea of equality. Assertion of universal and fundamental equality was undoubtedly central not just to the Radical Enlightenment but to the entire structure of democratic values espoused by the modern West. Yet, neither the philosophical nor historical grounding of this idea, that is it intellectual origins and roots, is at all obvious and this whole issue had been, to a quite remarkable extent, shrouded in neglect in the historical academic literature. Surprisingly ignored as a cultural phenomenon, claiming the basic equality of men and women also continues to be widely opposed and rejected in much of the world today." Id. at 545. "Radical Enlightenment equality urged the democratization of knowledge and making the same idea, techniques, and critical methods available to the poor and unprivileged as the rich and privileged had access to. Yet a Postmodernist claiming this rhetoric of equality was really an arrogant quasi-colonial, western 'Enlightenment discourse', designed to master the cultures and traditions of others, might still raise the objection that this was a bogus equality extended to white Europeans and Americans but not to the rest of mankind. Was not the greater part of the world falling under European domination by the later eighteenth century? Yet it is precisely here, with its stress on the fundamental unity of mankind, that the Radical Enlightenment opposed the new varieties of hierarchy--racism and imperialism--with which more conservative elements of the Enlightenment and their nineteenth-century heirs, were to exert their greatest and most pervasive impact on the history of the next two centuries." Id. at 569-570.).
Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2001) (From the backcover: "In this controversial and original study the renowned cultural historian Jonathan I. Israel reveals the pivotal role of Spinoza and the influence of the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 a Spinozism on the intellectual and political revolution of the eighteenth century.").
Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2010) ("Radical Enlightenment is a set of basic principles that can be summed up concisely as: democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state. It sees the purpose of the state as being the wholly secular one of promoting the worldly interests of the majority and preventing vested minority interests from capturing control of the legislative process. Its chief maxim is that all men have the same basic needs, rights, and status irrespective of what they believe or what religious, economic, or ethnic group they belong to and that consequently all ought to be treated alike, on the basis of equity, whether black or white, male or female, religious or nonreligious, and that all deserve to have their personal interests and aspirations equally respected by law and government. Its universalism lies in its claim that all men have the same right to pursue happiness in their own way, and think and say whatever they see fit, and no one, including those who convince others they are divinely chosen to be their masters, rulers, or spiritual guides, is justified in denying or hindering others in the enjoyment of rights that pertain to all men and women equally." "These principles, broadly accepted nowhere in the world before the American Revolution--and by no means fully implemented there . . . --are only very patchily accepted by societies and governments in much of the world today. But while in many places these core democratic values retain only a precarious foothold, they did finally triumph in much of the world after 1945. . . . " Id. at viii-ix.).
Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published--'godless,' 'full of abominations,' 'a book forged in hell . . . by the devil himself.' Religious and secular authorities saw it as a threat to faith, social and political harmony, and everyday morality, and its author was almost universally regarded as a religious subversive and political radical who sought to spread atheism throughout Europe. Yet Spinoza's book has contributed as much as the Declaration of Independence or Thomas Paine's Common Sense to modern liberal, secular, and democratic thinking. In A Book Forged in Hell, Steven Nadler tells the fascinating story of this extraordinary book: its radical claims and their background in the philosophical, religious, and political tensions of the Dutch Golden Age, as well as the vitriolic reaction these ideas inspired.").
Benedict de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1985) (Spinoza has his 'Buddha" moment, then he loses it and, then again, regains it in bits and parts. "After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile, and I saw that all the things which were the cause or object of my fear had nothing of good or bad in themselves, except insofar as [my] mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, capable of communicating itself, and which alone would affect the mind, all others being rejected--whether there was something, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity." Id. at 7. From the Ethics: "The essence of man does not involve necessary existence, i.e., from the order of nature it can happen equally that this or that man does exist, or that he does not exist." Id. at 447. "If someone begins to hate a thing he has loved, so that the Love is completely destroyed, then (from an equal cause) he will have a greater hate for it than if he had never loved it, and this hate will be greater as the Love before was greater." Id at 515. "He who Hates someone will strive to do evil to him, unless he fears that a greater evil to himself will arise from this; and on the other hand, he who loves someone will strive to benefit him by the same law" Id. at 516. "Hate is increased by being returned, but can be destroyed by Love." Id. at 518. "Hate completely conquered by Love passes into Love, and the Love is therefore greater than if Hate had not preceded it." Id. at 519. "Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we retrain our lusts; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them." Id. at 616.).
* I was reading Dialectic of Enlightenment between yoga practices one recent Saturday. A woman, having noticed the title and, more specifically, the word "enlightenment" in the title, asked whether I was reading the book in preparation for yoga class. I found that humorous, as would Horkheimer and Adorno, but that would be unfair to the woman because she was unaware of the actual subject-matter of the book. She was thinking of 'enlightenment' as that notion might be understood in Eastern philosophy or religion. Still, even that is humorous. As if the typical modern Western yoga class would facilitate one's path to any kind of Eastern enlightenment. If one has been to a typical modern yoga class, with it emphasis on the asanas/postures, one will appreciate the humor in the question. There are, I think, individuals at yoga practice who are struggling along the long road towards enlightenment, but yoga class is not central to that journey, not a significant marker along the road.
Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Politial Treatise (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), edited by Jonathan Israel, translated from the Latin by Michael Silverthorne & Jonathan Israel (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2007) ("True joy and happiness lie in the simple enjoyment of what is good and not in the kind of false pride that enjoys happiness because others are excluded from it. Anyone who thinks that he is happy because his situation is better than other people's or because he is happier and more fortunate than they, knows nothing of true happiness and joy, and the pleasure he derives from his attitude is either plain silly or spiteful and malicious. For example, a person's true joy and felicity lie solely in his wisdom and knowledge of truth, not in being wiser than others or in others' being without knowledge of truth, since this does not increase his own wisdom which is his true felicity. Anyone therefore who takes pleasure in that way is enjoying another's misfortune, and to that extent is envious and malign, and does not know true wisdom or the peace of the true life." Id. at 43.).
In contrast, also see:
* Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noeer, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 2002) ("In the bourgeois economy the social work of each individual is mediated by the principle of the self; for some this labor is supposed to yield increased capital, for others the strength for extra work. But the more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul. Enlightened thinking [note, I think Horkheimer and Adorno mean, in Israel terminology, 'conservative enlightenment', not 'radical enlightenment'] has an answer for this, too: finally, the transcendental subject of knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order, which therefore run all the more smoothly. Objectivity has volatilized itself into the logic of supposedly optional rules, to gain more absolute control. Positivism, which finally did not shrink from laying hands on the idlest fancy of all, thought itself, eliminated the last intervening agency between individual action and the social norm. The technical process, to which the subject has been reified after eradication of that process from consciousness, is as free from the ambiguous meanings of mythical thoughts as from meaning altogether, since reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus. Reason serves as a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools, rigidly purpose-directed as a calamitous as the precisely calculated operations of material production, the results of which for human beings escape all calculations. [] The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape. The oldest fear, that of losing ones own name, is being fulfilled, For civilization, purely natural existence, both animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger, 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. Over the millennia the living memory of prehistory, of it nomadic period an even more of the truly prepatriarchal stages, has been expunged from human consciousness with the most terrible punishments. The enlightened spirit replaced fire and the wheel by the stigma it attached to all irrationality, which led to perdition. It hedonism was moderate, extremes being no less repugnant to enlightenment than to Aristotle. [] The essence of enlightenment is the choice between alternatives, and the inescapability of this choice is that of power. Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self. 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. Under the compulsion of power, human labor has always led aways from myth and, under power, has always fallen back under its spell." Id. at 23-24.).
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1976) ("What people take for granted is usually more important than their pronouncements or manifestoes. The unexpressed and implied ideology of nineteenth-century America rested, I believe, on a series of tacit compromises. Of these the most basic was the compromise between a belief in moral certainties and a belief in the desirability of change and progress. This compromise was achieved and maintained not by intellectual argument, but by assertion and symbolization--almost without realization of its inherent fragility." Id. at xi. "When one looks at the eighteenth-century in America with..., one finds two main clusters of ideas. One of these consists of the doctrines of Protestantism and particularly Calvinistic Protestantism, drawn from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe but developed and institutionalized with great vigor in America, particularly in New England. The other cluster of ideas is drawn from the Enlightenment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The relation between these two major idea systems is basic to the understanding of eighteenth-century America, and indeed, I would say, the understanding of America in any period." Id. at xi-xii. (italics and emphasis added). In many ways, might much of the overarching differences between late-twentith-ceentury democrats and republicans be understood in terms of their embrace or rejection, respectively, of European Enlightenment, and their rejection or embrace, respectively, of orthodoxy in religious beliefs? From the bookjacket: ""It has long been taken for granted that the ideas of the European Enlightenment--of men like Locke, Hume, Voltaire, or Rousseau--profoundly affected America during the Revolutionary age.... " "May defines the Enlightenment broadly. Men of the Enlightenment were all those who believed that their own age was more enlightened than the past and that man and nature are best understood though the use of natural faculties. He treats the Enlightenment as a 'religion,' even though many of its leading proponents oppose organized religion. Throughout the book he relates the Enlightenment to Protestant Christianity, for it is out of the clashes and reconciliations between those two systems that nineteenth-century American culture--a culture that lasted almost to our own time--took shape." Defined so broadly, the religion of Enlightenment obviously included many different kinds o people--deists and skeptics and liberal Christians, aristocrats and democrats, conservatives and revolutionaries. May divides the European Enlightenment into four major categories, and shows how each had a different effect in America. Obviously some ideas could be transmitted more easily than others to a society overwhelmingly Protestant and rapidly becoming democratic. May shows how the Enlightenment affected the thoughts and actions of major figures like Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams, but these familiar figures are treated against a background of less well-known people--doctors and ministers, scientists and planters and politicians." "Beginning with the movement of relatively conservative British Enlightened ideas to America before the Revolution, May moves on to the transmission of the skeptical thought of men like Voltaire and Hume, and the revolutionary prophesies and programs of Rousseau, Condorcet, and Paine. The climax of the book cones in the 1709s, when radical enlightenment ideas clashed head-on with New England's religious and social traditions. The last part of the book shows how some aspects of the European Enlightenment were assimilated and others rejected by the new American society of the nineteenth century.").
In contrast, also see:
* Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noeer, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 2002) ("In the bourgeois economy the social work of each individual is mediated by the principle of the self; for some this labor is supposed to yield increased capital, for others the strength for extra work. But the more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul. Enlightened thinking [note, I think Horkheimer and Adorno mean, in Israel terminology, 'conservative enlightenment', not 'radical enlightenment'] has an answer for this, too: finally, the transcendental subject of knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order, which therefore run all the more smoothly. Objectivity has volatilized itself into the logic of supposedly optional rules, to gain more absolute control. Positivism, which finally did not shrink from laying hands on the idlest fancy of all, thought itself, eliminated the last intervening agency between individual action and the social norm. The technical process, to which the subject has been reified after eradication of that process from consciousness, is as free from the ambiguous meanings of mythical thoughts as from meaning altogether, since reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus. Reason serves as a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools, rigidly purpose-directed as a calamitous as the precisely calculated operations of material production, the results of which for human beings escape all calculations. [] The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape. The oldest fear, that of losing ones own name, is being fulfilled, For civilization, purely natural existence, both animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger, 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. Over the millennia the living memory of prehistory, of it nomadic period an even more of the truly prepatriarchal stages, has been expunged from human consciousness with the most terrible punishments. The enlightened spirit replaced fire and the wheel by the stigma it attached to all irrationality, which led to perdition. It hedonism was moderate, extremes being no less repugnant to enlightenment than to Aristotle. [] The essence of enlightenment is the choice between alternatives, and the inescapability of this choice is that of power. Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self. 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. Under the compulsion of power, human labor has always led aways from myth and, under power, has always fallen back under its spell." Id. at 23-24.).
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1976) ("What people take for granted is usually more important than their pronouncements or manifestoes. The unexpressed and implied ideology of nineteenth-century America rested, I believe, on a series of tacit compromises. Of these the most basic was the compromise between a belief in moral certainties and a belief in the desirability of change and progress. This compromise was achieved and maintained not by intellectual argument, but by assertion and symbolization--almost without realization of its inherent fragility." Id. at xi. "When one looks at the eighteenth-century in America with..., one finds two main clusters of ideas. One of these consists of the doctrines of Protestantism and particularly Calvinistic Protestantism, drawn from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe but developed and institutionalized with great vigor in America, particularly in New England. The other cluster of ideas is drawn from the Enlightenment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The relation between these two major idea systems is basic to the understanding of eighteenth-century America, and indeed, I would say, the understanding of America in any period." Id. at xi-xii. (italics and emphasis added). In many ways, might much of the overarching differences between late-twentith-ceentury democrats and republicans be understood in terms of their embrace or rejection, respectively, of European Enlightenment, and their rejection or embrace, respectively, of orthodoxy in religious beliefs? From the bookjacket: ""It has long been taken for granted that the ideas of the European Enlightenment--of men like Locke, Hume, Voltaire, or Rousseau--profoundly affected America during the Revolutionary age.... " "May defines the Enlightenment broadly. Men of the Enlightenment were all those who believed that their own age was more enlightened than the past and that man and nature are best understood though the use of natural faculties. He treats the Enlightenment as a 'religion,' even though many of its leading proponents oppose organized religion. Throughout the book he relates the Enlightenment to Protestant Christianity, for it is out of the clashes and reconciliations between those two systems that nineteenth-century American culture--a culture that lasted almost to our own time--took shape." Defined so broadly, the religion of Enlightenment obviously included many different kinds o people--deists and skeptics and liberal Christians, aristocrats and democrats, conservatives and revolutionaries. May divides the European Enlightenment into four major categories, and shows how each had a different effect in America. Obviously some ideas could be transmitted more easily than others to a society overwhelmingly Protestant and rapidly becoming democratic. May shows how the Enlightenment affected the thoughts and actions of major figures like Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams, but these familiar figures are treated against a background of less well-known people--doctors and ministers, scientists and planters and politicians." "Beginning with the movement of relatively conservative British Enlightened ideas to America before the Revolution, May moves on to the transmission of the skeptical thought of men like Voltaire and Hume, and the revolutionary prophesies and programs of Rousseau, Condorcet, and Paine. The climax of the book cones in the 1709s, when radical enlightenment ideas clashed head-on with New England's religious and social traditions. The last part of the book shows how some aspects of the European Enlightenment were assimilated and others rejected by the new American society of the nineteenth century.").
* I was reading Dialectic of Enlightenment between yoga practices one recent Saturday. A woman, having noticed the title and, more specifically, the word "enlightenment" in the title, asked whether I was reading the book in preparation for yoga class. I found that humorous, as would Horkheimer and Adorno, but that would be unfair to the woman because she was unaware of the actual subject-matter of the book. She was thinking of 'enlightenment' as that notion might be understood in Eastern philosophy or religion. Still, even that is humorous. As if the typical modern Western yoga class would facilitate one's path to any kind of Eastern enlightenment. If one has been to a typical modern yoga class, with it emphasis on the asanas/postures, one will appreciate the humor in the question. There are, I think, individuals at yoga practice who are struggling along the long road towards enlightenment, but yoga class is not central to that journey, not a significant marker along the road.
