THE AGE OF REASON FULL FLOURISHING OF

Thomas Paine, a famed Revolutionary political activist and Founding Father, is also remembered for his attempts to expose Christianity as a fraud in his pamphlet A ge of Reason Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. These writers identify a pathology in Western thought that equates rationality with positivist science, capitalist exploitation, the domination of nature вЂ“ even, in the case of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, with Nazism and the Holocaust.A Response to Thomas PaineвЂ™s. The pejorative view of the Enlightenment flows from the philosophy of G W F Hegel right through to the critical theory of the mid-20th-century Frankfurt School. For material written during or after 1970, please refer.Strikingly, this rosy picture of the so-called вЂage of reasonвЂ™ is weirdly similar to the image advanced by its naive detractors. The Historical Library contains writings written before 1970, only.

The EnlightenmentвЂ™s contribution was to add science to this picture of reason, and religious superstition to the notion of passionate enslavement.However, to say that the Enlightenment was a movement of rationalism against passion, of science against superstition, of progressive politics against conservative tribalism is to be deeply mistaken. Since the ancient Stoics, philosophy has generally looked on the passions as threats to liberty: the weak are slaves to them the strong assert their reason and will, and so remain free. THE story has often enough been told of how the seventeenth-century founders of modern science repudiated.The passions вЂ“ embodied affects, desires, appetites вЂ“ were forerunners to the modern understanding of emotion. Their collective error is what makes the clichГ© of the вЂage of reasonвЂ™ so powerful.FINAL CAUSES IN THE AGE OF REASON. But in holding that the Enlightenment was a movement of reason opposed to the passions, apologists and critics are two sides of the same coin.

The truth is that Hegel and the 19th-century Romantics, who believed they were moved by a new spirit of beauty and feeling, summoned up the вЂage of reasonвЂ™ to serve as a foil for their own self-conception. He said that the rational subject conceived by Immanuel Kant вЂ“ the Enlightenment philosopher par excellence вЂ“ produced citizens who were alienated, dispassionate and estranged from nature, with the murderous rationalism of the French Terror the logical outcome.However, the Enlightenment was a diverse phenomenon most of its philosophy stood far apart from Kantianism, let alone from HegelвЂ™s version of Kant. Hegel, in the early 1800s, was one of the first to go on the offensive.

The Age Of Reason Full Flourishing Of

That meant rationality was necessarily plural: it varied from place to place, rather than existing as an undifferentiated universal.Another totemic figure of the French Enlightenment was Denis Diderot. For Condillac, proper rationality required societies to develop more вЂnaturalвЂ™ ways of communicating. These urges gave rise to passions and desires, then to the development of languages, and on to the full flourishing of the mind.To avoid falling into a trap of false articulacy, and to keep as close as possible to sensuous experience, Condillac was a fan of вЂprimitiveвЂ™ languages in preference to those that relied on abstract ideas. All aspects of human thought grew from our senses, he said вЂ“ specifically, the ability to be drawn towards pleasant sensations and driven away from painful ones.

With many of the key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume, he believed that morality was grounded in sense-experience. A century and a half before RenГ© Magritte wrote the iconic line вЂThis Is Not a PipeвЂ™ under his painting The Treachery of Images (1928-9), Diderot wrote a short story called вЂThis Is Not a StoryвЂ™ ( Ceci nвЂ™est pas un conte).Diderot did believe in the utility of reason in the pursuit of truth вЂ“ but he had an acute enthusiasm for the passions, particularly when it came to morality and aesthetics. Diderot did not write down his philosophy in the form of abstract treatises: along with Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade, Diderot was a master of the philosophical novel (as well as experimental and pornographic fiction, satire and art criticism).

A person without the ability to be affected, either because of the absence of passions or the absence of senses, would be morally monstrous.That the Enlightenment celebrated sensibility and feeling didnвЂ™t entail a rejection of science, however. For Diderot, then, eliminating the passions could produce only an abomination. We judge the beauty of a painting, a landscape or our loverвЂ™s face just as we judge the morality of a character in a novel, a play or our own lives вЂ“ that is, we judge the good and the beautiful directly and without the need of reason.

In this, the philosophes were in fact more closely aligned with the Romantics than the latter liked to believe.Generalising about intellectual movements is always a dangerous business. So the philosophical suspicion of reason was not a rejection of rationality per se it was only a rejection of reason in isolation from the senses, and alienated from the impassioned body. Instead, it was the speculative system-builder who was the enemy of scientific progress вЂ“ the Cartesian physician who saw the body as a mere machine, or those who learned medicine by reading Aristotle but not by observing the ill. The archetypical example here was a doctor, attuned to the bodily rhythms of patients and their particular symptoms.

The present warrants criticism, but it will do no good if itвЂ™s based on a myth about some glorious, dispassionate past that never was. Romanticism was largely a continuation of Enlightenment themes, not a break or rupture from them.If we are to heal the divides of the contemporary historical moment, we should give away the fiction that reason alone has ever held the day. Particularly in France, rationality was not opposed to sensibility but was predicated on and continuous with it. But in this respect Kant was isolated from many, if not most, of his eraвЂ™s major themes. Some thinkers did invoke a strict dichotomy of reason and the passions, and privilege the a priori over sensation вЂ“ Kant, most famously.