19^th-Century Philosophy

Lecture 1

Taking the Measure of our Times: the Dialectic of Enlightenment

1) What is the Enlightenment & its Aftermath, the “Church of Reason.”

a) 3 Revolutions that make up the Enlightenment:

i) The Scientific Revolution 16^th & 17^th Centuries:

(1) Galileo’s (1554-1642) mathematization of nature

(2) Bacon’s (1561-1626) insistence upon controlled observation and experimentation: the empirical method

(3) Newton’s (1642-1727) mechanization of nature

b) The Industrial Revolution (1750 – 1850):

c) The American (1776) and French Political Revolutions (1789 – 1800):

d) NB: The protestant reformation of the 16^th Century – directed against the Roman Catholic Church – paved the way for the Enlightenment. It’s focus upon sola scriptura (the sole authority of scripture), sola fide (faith alone, not works or official church declarations, justifies us before god, where such faith is itself a gift of grace, sola gratia), and the “priesthood of believers” (one comes to good on one’s own, not through some earthly intermediary) – these foci place unprecedented emphasis upon the singular individual as the source of responsibility. Hegel will later insist upon the “infinite right of subjectivity,” the absolute nature of individual responsibility.

2) What are the issues that we face in contemporary circumstance? The Dialectic of Enlightenment in 2010:

a) Scientific self-objectification:

i) The human body as biological mechanisms and neurological functions:

(1) The repairing of the organism and prosthetic enhancement.

(2) Technologies for changing and controlling the brain.

b) Freedom versus Determinism:

i) The “manifest” image of human beings as capable of freedom and therein responsibility is an illusion, a superstition not unlike religion and myth.

ii) The experience of having freedom of choice is pure confabulation, a primitive and superstitious “theory” about the real material causes of our experiences and actions.

iii) We then assume a technological orientation to our own subjectivity, knowing it to be a malleable instrument that we can technically altered and improve.

c) Moral skepticism versus Moral realism:

i) Moral judgments are just statements of desire or preference.

ii) There is a truth about what is right and wrong, and this truth is built into the cosmos in such a way that humans can discover moral facts.

d) Faith versus reason:

i) Science versus scripture: Science conclusively demonstrates that there are no gods.

ii) Resurgence of religious fundamentalism against secularism.

iii) Paradoxical reversal of religion and science: god gave us science, made us scientific creatures.

e) Secular versus theological governance:

i) Secularism as the demise of the ancien regime – divine right monarchy – and the formation of secular rational law models of political governance: classical liberalism and republicanism.

ii) The re-feudalization of politics and civil society: Theocratic governance structures.

f) What is it art?

i) Are evaluations of beauty and other artistic qualities purely subjective reactions, a matter of what just happens to give one pleasure?

ii) Are evaluations of beauty and other artistic qualities just symbolic devices deployed by a hegemonic majority culture to oppresses and dominate other cultural worldviews?

iii) Is art a simple commodity alongside others?

g) Dogmatism & Skepticism:

i) Dogmatism: certain beliefs are simply ultimate, known through intuition, feeling, revelation, or divine inspiration.

ii) Skepticism: nothing can be rationally defended since everything can be criticized.

h) Ecological movement & the threat of global devastation:

i) Gaia hypothesis: there is one living being that pervades all of nature.

ii) Deep ecology: Nature directs humankind to know its place within nature as a responsive custodian.

iii) Any posture of “listening/belonging” to nature as the ultimate source of meaning and direction in life.

i) Perennial war: globalism and the ideal of “perpetual peace.”

j) Revolutionary times & the threat of a reign of terror.

k) What, then, is modernity?

l) What is a Human Being?

3) In 1780s and ‘90s, Kant faced the following pressing issues that make up the dialectic of Enlightenment:

a) Dogmatism & Skepticism

b) The objectification of humankind

c) Freedom versus Determinism

d) Moral skepticism

e) Faith versus reason

f) Demise of the ancien regime

g) Political revolution and the Reign of Terror

h) Globalism or the concern with “perpetual peace”

i) What is Art?

j) What is a Human Being?

4) Our contemporary issues are altered, advanced, and exacerbates forms of exactly the same problems that Immanuel Kant faced at the close of the 18^th Century: Kant asked 5 questions:

a) What can I know? (epistemological question: what is knowledge)

b) What should I do? (moral question: what is right/wrong)

c) What may I hope for? (aesthetic question: what can I imagine)

d) What is humankind? (anthropological question: what is human being)

e) What is Enlightenment? (historical and critical question: where are we now)

5) Kant’s Copernican Revolution in Philosophy: Provisional stabilization of the Enlightenment around 3 Critiques:

a) The Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

b) The Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

c) The Critique of Judgment Power (1790)