Listening to Philosophy Bites recently, I was intrigued by an interview with Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum, who proposes that we have yet to fully and deeply appreciate and reconcile the values introduced to our culture, apropos The Enlightenment.
She uses much 'we' language in the interview - I like this, in this context, because by virtue of it she hands us back the responsibility, as Westerners, to examine how, and why, Fundamentalism becomes attractive to some people in a liberal culture. She asks us to examine what we of progressive Western values have done to provoke conservative response - to consider is it possible that part of what is sought in Fundamental movements is an attempt retrieve something more than what materialistic late capitalism provides. By establishing that this is the case, we can start to review what might be sought in terms of values by those that orient to conservative modes of being and dialectic.
She then prods and pokes the Enlightenment, to reveal four robust values that may have self-transformative potential, and thus may have been undervalued, in our rush away from the perceived emphasis on reason, to the exclusion of all other modes of knowing, in unfortunate by-products of the aftermath (ha!) of the Age of Rationalism.
Firstly, Neiman proposes we re-visit happiness - to look at the relativism with which it might be considered, but to not capitulate to that relativism. By this means, we can know that 'money does not but happiness', and we can be prevented from projecting happiness into a Golden Age in the past or the Heavenly future. Self-criticism may ask that we intervene on behalf of others, to fully express our own happiness - happiness is not an end-state passive consumption, but an active principle of giving back to the world.
The second Enlightenment value she asks that we look at is reason - not the caricatured emotionless, passionless version of reason, rather the opposition to blind authority that reason can represent. The Enlightenment asks in the public sphere that we jsutify and argue about our reasons in a transparent way.
The third value is reverence - the Enlightenment may have been against institutionalised religion, but the demand to ethically think for yourself is at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, and Neiman leans on this to present a reverence through the principle of understanding - a seeking to engage, in awe of, and in gratitude extended to, that which we seek to know. Whatever the world is, we know that we did not make it, and Neiman proposes that this recognition may indeed be a reconciling factor between the secular and the religious.
The final value is hope. In necessary industrial progress, no century was more concerned with the existence of evil - they made fun of optimism (as per Voltaire's Candide) but they did believe that human beings could lend effort to improve the world. 300 years ago it was standard for people to be drawn and quartered in the centre of town, with tickets sold. Torture, in this form, was abolished, and intriguingly, we have it back now. The Enlightenment offered regression, at the same time as progress, and the existence of both of these principles, simultaneously, is something worthwhile to consider in light of Cheney and Rumsfeld and the power of certain individuals in power. She comes out as rejecting pessimism as cowardly, and proposes that in light of the chance for human action to make a difference, we become responsible for ourselves, and others.
The interview was more interesting to listen to than I seem to have made it sound here. I think, partly, I'm a little bit in love with the reactionary idea, that the Enlightenment has more crunchy goodness in it than we've extracted from our historical Caesar Salad, yet.
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