tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post2596348240637477879..comments2023-11-02T11:32:38.324+00:00Comments on The Joy of Curmudgeonry: The Charmed Life of CommunismDeogolwulfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02197539477668018797noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post-77943135932685760102008-05-22T13:25:00.000+01:002008-05-22T13:25:00.000+01:00"Romanticism may be traced back to the enlightenme..."Romanticism may be traced back to the enlightenment. However it still remains a reaction to it."<BR/><BR/>It was indeed a reaction to it, or rather to the rationalistic aspect of it, but it also developed some of its implications. As Frederick C. Beiser puts it: <BR/><BR/>“If the romantics were critics of the Aufklärung, they were also its disciples.” <BR/><BR/>(“Early Romanticism and the Aufklärung”, in What is Enlightenement? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed., J. Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p.318.)<BR/><BR/>"that path is one of many possible ones from the enlightenment"<BR/><BR/>Broadly, the sort of view I have been promoting. The Enlightenment was a complex process and is not coterminous with those aspects of it that we might favour. <BR/><BR/>"If you want to claim that nihlism is the inevitable product of the enlightenment then I think you need to explain why."<BR/><BR/>I don't want to claim any such thing if by the above you mean to impute that I mean to say that all ideas that arose in the Enlightenment necessarily lead their adherents to nihilism. (That wouldn't be true even if all such ideas logically implied nihilism.) But if you mean to impute that I mean to say that nihilism first arises as a named phenomenon in the Enlightenment, then I am happy to agree. Jacobi himself used the word to characterise the implications of rationalism, and we generally take the word to refer to the mechanistic-materialistic belief that the world is without objective meaning, purpose, or essential value -- a "disenchantment" with the world which finds expression in the Enlightenment and with which many people now agree, or rather, they agree intellectually. I say "intellectually" because such beliefs and their implications do not often filter down, so to speak, fully into people's operational beliefs: most people holding to the intellectual belief leave it in the abstract and remain detatched from any implications that it might have for their behaviour.Deogolwulfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02197539477668018797noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post-57806331946438445672008-05-22T12:08:00.000+01:002008-05-22T12:08:00.000+01:00the progressive social schemes derives much from t...the <I>progressive social schemes derives much from the "optimistic critical spirit" of the Enlightenment</I><BR/><BR/>Hmmm?<BR/><BR/>Let me try to avoid Hegelian dialectics but still observe that any antithesis is a reaction to a thesis. Romanticism may be traced back to the enlightenment. However it still remains a reaction to it. The fact that there is a grey area in the development from enlightenment to romanticism does not change the fact that the latter is better understood as a reaction to the former and hence a different thing.<BR/><BR/>Similarly, one can trace the path from the Enlightenment to Post Modernism or Madeleine Bunting. That doesn't make the end of the path belong to the enlightenment. I agree that Bunting has benefited from it, doesn't understand it but she isn't articulating a philosophy that can be said to be enlightenment. Distinctions matter.<BR/><BR/>Moreover, that path is one of many possible ones from the enlightenment. eg. Ayn Rand gives us an alternate path and that is clearly not nihilistic. Clearly in Randian world the enlightenment legacy of individualism would be prioritised over others. For whatever reason, we drifted away from the individualism of the early Scottish enlightenment towards a collectivist ethos. <BR/><BR/>If you want to claim that nihlism is the inevitable product of the enlightenment then I think you need to explain why.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post-39564257952382417022008-05-22T09:19:00.000+01:002008-05-22T09:19:00.000+01:00Point taken, but the subscription to progressive s...Point taken, but the subscription to progressive social schemes derives much from the "optimistic critical spirit" of the Enlightenment. It would be interesting to note just how much nihilism owes to that spirit. After all, Jacobi, the coiner of the word "nihilism", had noted it in his contemporaries, and the history of nihilism goes hand-in-hand with progressivism. This is most notable in the Russian radicals. <BR/><BR/>“In its final form the Enlightenment turns against itself: humanism becomes a moral nihilism, doubt leads to epistemological nihilism, and the affirmation of the person undergoes a metamorphosis that transforms it into a totalitarian idea.”<BR/><BR/>Leszek Kolakowski, “Looking for the Barbarians: The Illusions of Cultural Universalism”, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p.30.Deogolwulfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02197539477668018797noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post-52884026547651117002008-05-21T18:27:00.000+01:002008-05-21T18:27:00.000+01:00I don't agree that Bunting perpetuates a optimisti...I don't agree that Bunting perpetuates a <I>optimistic critical spirit</I>. I think she is driven by nihilist self hatred. She learnt that white people are the cancer of the human race and never looked back.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post-11652581140101464242008-05-21T17:03:00.000+01:002008-05-21T17:03:00.000+01:00I think placing Kant in the counter-Enlightenment ...I think placing Kant in the counter-Enlightenment would be drastic, even if counter-Enlightenment ideas can be traced back to him. Such can also be said of Hume, whose ideas had a profound influence on the ideas of Jacobi and Hamann; or Rousseau, whose ideas had great influence on those of the Romantics. All were men of the Enlightenment nonetheless. <BR/><BR/>The Enlightenment was mostly a matter of the emancipation of ideas from traditional authority. It was, however, more inspired by passion and optimism than by reason, a view to which the zeal of rationalism — the arrogation of all manner of domains to that of reason — gives testimony. That the Enlightenment gave birth to Romanticism shouldn’t surprise us. Romanticism fully idealised one of the main motives of the Enlightenment — the emancipation from authority — especially by its idea of the creative power of the unbounded individual. It also carried on the Enlightenment legacy of radical criticism, whilst rejecting rationalism as being too stifling of aesthetic sensibility, intuitive expression, and creativity, not to say, perverting an understanding of reason itself. <BR/><BR/>Radical ignoramuses such as Bunting who reject the Enlightenment don’t know the debt they owe to it; they perpetuate at least one -- and perhaps its most important -- aspect: its optimistic critical spirit. Still, I think I prefer her kind to those who fully identify with the Enlightenment for little better reason than that of its name and its rationalistic promises. Marketing was invented for such people.Deogolwulfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02197539477668018797noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post-28571575004145645952008-05-21T12:30:00.000+01:002008-05-21T12:30:00.000+01:00Yes, I agree with your placement of Rousseau. Inte...Yes, I agree with your placement of Rousseau. <BR/><BR/>Interestingly <A HREF="http://www.stephenhicks.org/" REL="nofollow">Stephen Hicks</A> traces Post Modernism back to Rousseau via Kant. Now it seems to me self evident that Post Modernism, in denying universalism, is anti-enlightenment. That raises the question of when did that path ceased to be enlightened. This has relevance to Grayling's suggestion that Rousseau stands at the head of a Romantic tradition. Is Kant anti-enlightenment too? <BR/><BR/>In leftist circles, universalist ideas have largely been superseded by relativism.<BR/><BR/>Now Grayling may well place himself on the left but that means he rubs shoulders with people who totally reject western ideas including the enlightenment legacy (eg. Bunting).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post-84701648462822499452008-05-20T10:07:00.000+01:002008-05-20T10:07:00.000+01:00"You might at a pinch get away with claiming it wa..."You might at a pinch get away with claiming it was the promised utopia."<BR/><BR/>Naturally, with a large dollop of special pleading. <BR/><BR/>As for my opinion on Monsieur Rousseau and his contribution to totalitarianism, see my recent and short appraisal <A HREF="http://curmudgeonjoy.blogspot.com/2008/04/professor-graylings-enlightenment-club.html" REL="nofollow">here</A>.Deogolwulfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02197539477668018797noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post-78522670466367222702008-05-19T15:38:00.000+01:002008-05-19T15:38:00.000+01:00Interesting comment about François-Noël Babeuf. I ...Interesting comment about François-Noël Babeuf. I don't think you have to look so far. <BR/><BR/>Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract contains the seeds of totalitarianism in the contradiction between the individual and general will. Rousseau grants powers to the collective by arguing that the general will knows better that any individual. Thus the collective executes citizens who deny the general will.<BR/><BR/>The leit-motif of collectivism is the marginalisation or death of opponents.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13305228.post-89478632513534552572008-05-19T15:25:00.000+01:002008-05-19T15:25:00.000+01:00re: TachellOne of the secret factors for a leftist...re: Tachell<BR/><BR/>One of the secret factors for a leftist in deciding whether to eulogise a particular socialist country is obscurity. ie the more we know, the less likely is the country to be celebrated in leftist circles. <BR/><BR/>During the time of Peter Tatchell's embrace, there was too much history about the Soviet Union to credibly claim that country (eg. Czechoslovakia was fresh). By contrast China was a closed society, which had just rejected the Soviet Block. You might at a pinch get away with claiming it was the promised utopia.<BR/><BR/>I doubt Tatchell knew much at all about the real China. Peter was 2 pages ahead of us in the bluffers guide and relied on the rest of us to be too lazy to look for better information.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com