Enlightenment… I finally finished reading the biography of Hobbes and
I’m ready to begin looking into the Enlightenment…
The Enlightenment… the beginning of the modern world… here, we finally
see the where the modern world began… we see our notion of progress and
of government and of the statement… “the of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”
the declaration of Independence is a Enlightenment document…
Written by men who have studied and participated in all facets
of the Enlightenment… Franklin and Jefferson for example…
Our political structure was created with Enlightenment ideals…
and you cannot understand those who followed without some
understanding of Enlightenment idea’s like Marx and Hegel, these are
children of the Enlightenment…
the enlightenment was a struggle against what they saw as the
tyranny of authority… to be free of the figures of authority
was part of their goal… and authority included the church…
this has been called the “Age of Reason” and that meant,
you followed reason instead of authority…
the enlightenment was not an event but was a process…
it was about method, not the goal… and it not only included
its proponents but those who argued against certain, certain
enlightenment ideals and idea’s… The most famous was of course,
Rousseau…who opposed certain aspects of the enlightenment but
was a child of other aspects of enlightenment…Rousseau
basic complaint against the enlightenment was that, to follow the
enlightenment meant you followed artificial and became
artificial… apart from and away from “Nature” or “Natural”
his goal was to turn man back to being part of or be himself, of nature…
which suggest that Rousseau felt that aspects of the enlightenment
turn people away from his natural self… the goal is to be human
and Rousseau felt that aspects of the enlightenment turned, separated
people from their natural or human aspects…
it is not enough to study who is for something, you must study
those who is against something to really understand an age, an
ideal or aspect of who we are… this idea of returning to our
authentic self returns in the 20th century with Existentialism…
I expect to spend the next several months on the Enlightenment
and I hope to better understand who we are by knowing where we have
been…
PS, a late edit, the constitution of the U.S is also an Enlightenment
document… and perhaps this is why we are no longer comfortable
with either documents is because they, as enlightenment documents,
no longer fit in our new age…for who can accept the enlightenment ideals
of say, progress, after the 20th century of World wars and internment camps
and 9/11… the events of the last 100 years may have, MAY HAVE,
made many of the beliefs of the enlightenment very hard to accept in
or believe in…we are facing a new environment and we must create
a belief system that enables us to comprehend this new environment
and be able to have actions in this new environment…
Kropotkin