In our last article we explored Charles Taylor’s concept of “the buffered self,” a peculiar kind of self-consciousness engendered by Enlightenment rationalism, and which has become customary (at least for educated elites) in our own time. We saw how it can be at once a source of pride, a profound source of accomplishment and self-worth, and also a source of Continue Reading …
Leo Strauss: Three Waves of Modernity
“The crisis of modernity reveals itself in the fact … that modern western man no longer knows what he wants – that he no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, right and wrong.” –Leo Strauss
Jurgen Habermas and the Public Sphere
“The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” –Jurgen Habermas
Carl Becker: The Heavenly City of Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
“In a very real sense it may be said of the eighteenth century that it was an age of faith as well as of reason, and of the thirteenth century that it was an age of reason as well as of faith.” –Carl Becker
Philosophy of History Part XXVI: Will Durant: The Story of Civilization
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.” –Will Durant
Philosophy of History Part VII: The Politics of Modernization
“Reason obeys itself, and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.” –Thomas Paine
“Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.” –Edmund Burke
Philosophy of History Part VI: The French Revolution
“What is the Third Estate? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something.” –Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès
Philosophy of History, Part V: Condorcet
“The time will come when the sun will shine only upon free men who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes.” –Condorcet
Philosophy of History, Part IV: Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”
“I have recorded the triumph of barbarism and religion.” -Edward Gibbon
Philosophy of History, Part III: Voltaire and the Age of Reason
“History should be written as philosophy.” –Voltaire
Philosophy of History Part I: The Enlightenment
” ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.” -Immanuel Kant
Amateur Philosophy at it Worst: How to Write a David Brooks Column
Ironically, the Enlightenment is also a favorite bogeyman of leftist university postmodernists. And oddly, they seem to associate the Enlightenment with the sciences, and do not see the latter as somehow having emancipated us from the former. For them, overcoming this bogeyman requires a much more radical project that includes an epistemological (and sometimes ethical) relativism that swallows up even the hard sciences. Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan and Derrida are their great post-Enlightenment and post-modern thinkers … not Malcolm Gladwell. For them, the irrational and communal do not lead us back to … family values.