12 ms·

The Myths of Enlightenment

94 points by diodorus 8y ago

claudiawerner 8y ago
A good view on the involvement of myth in the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment's unconscious project to simply replace the form of myth with thinking disguised as scientific, I'd recommend Horkheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of Enlightenment[0]. [0] The book was re-published as late as 1965. Here's a summary before you read: https://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-dialectic-of-enlightenment/ https://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-dia...
- crispinb 8y ago
  I don't find the summary particularly promising. So much 20th century European philosophy seems to dodge issues of truth in favour of constructing stories of (psychological & social-cultural) motivation. But I admit to being poorly read in the field, and won't come to a judgement on the basis of a summary. From another angle, I enjoy (if don't quite know what to make of) David Abram's critique of the Enlightenment in his Becoming Animal and (more particularly) The Spell of the Sensuous. His target is really disembodied/symbolic thinking as such, but the Enlightenment might be considered a (proclaimed) victory of that line of human cognitive history.
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    The point of contention here is whether a beautiful ideal of aiming for pure truth as separate from psychological and social-cultural influence is sufficient to talk about real-world projects carried out by real people and the movements formed by those individual projects which developed through bitter and personal disagreements. The three people who helped us understand the effects of society on our thought are highly respected for their insights in helping see through this ideology: Marx, Nietzche and Freud. Each has helped us understand the genealogy of modernist consciousness. I say it's ideological because at heart it is: our motivations don't come from nowhere, even if they are pure. When we look at projects like the Enlightenment we have to step back and use critical tools (read: all the social sciences), rather than take what we see read from authors at face value. An example you might like more is Bertrand Russell's assessment of Aquinas, in which Russell dismisses Aquinas as a philosopher because he claims Aquinas actually started at his conclusion - to prove God exists. But Aquinas, of course, claimed to start from where he should have, with the rational investigation of the world. We can say a very similar thing about Descartes - how did Descartes establish the existence of God within two paragraphs (I'm not joking) of establishing the existence of his own mind even after throwing out all preconceived notions?
    - crispinb 8y ago
      Weaving motivational tales though seems to be entirely undecidable, a process without end or means of resolving disagreement. Much like the sloppier end of evolutionary 'just so' stories. The strand of the Enlightenment with the better defense against this type of critique isn't the Cartesian (philosophy), but the Encyclopedist (science). Abrams is interesting on this - instead of focusing on biases introduced by science's historicity, he addresses the lacunae central to the very project of severing symbolic cognition from its embodied origins.
      - claudiawerner 8y ago
        I should have been more clear: the point here isn't to guess intentions, it's to examine the actual results of the project and its reasons for being (e.g distrust in religious authority which Russell situates in the formation of Protestantism) and to identify the same ideology in thinking today. Tracing the relationship between myth and enlightenment is done in the same way we trace the relationship between the Ancient Greek epics and their philosophy, or the Protestant work ethic and capitalism.
        crispinb 8y ago
        Yes I understand (though I suspect the distinction between psychological & textual/ideological exegesis might be more ambiguous than you suggest). Nonetheless, it's just weaving stories and comparing interpretations, and there's no objective way to do this (or, put more psychologically, there's no route to generating agreement on the best story). Cf science, which attempts (step by step) to find methodological/algorithmic ways to expunge subjectivities (ask nature, rather than ask yourself). My (undercooked) suggestion is that an Abrams-like analysis may do a better job of showing what is lacking in the science tributary of the Enlightenment. It's not a methodological issue (rooting out ideology), it's a representational one (symbol systems yanked out of their living backdrop miss too much of the real world).
    - PixyMisa 8y ago
      As Jeremy Wolfe said in his Introduction to Psychology lectures on MIT OCW: There's two things to know about Freud - he's wrong and he's dead. The same goes for Marx and Nietzsche.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >I don't find the summary particularly promising. So much 20th century European philosophy seems to dodge issues of truth in favour of constructing stories of (psychological & social-cultural) motivation. Humans don't operate on truth, they operate on psychological & social-cultural motivation, and use "truth" as a pretext. We not only lie to others (e.g. saying we want X for justice and truth, but instead we only care of being elected, and we might even harm X with out actions). We also lie to ourselves all the time. And we also have delusions we consider as truths (based on psychological & social-cultural motivation). Those lynching black people, for example, didn't consider themselves bad, but as people doing the good thing, and punishing people that are bad for their community. Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer's starting point is 40 years of carnage (WWI and WWII, plus USSR gulags and the holocaust, Hiroshima, Dresden, etc.) from supposed Enlightened states, and where even those against enlightenment ideas made use of enlightenment methods (e.g. the Nazis building their technical industries, creating rockets and novel weaponry, engineering the elimination of Jews on industrial scale --even using IBM tabulating machines--, and so on). Plus, it's not like Adorno and Hork. propose some bizarro alternative fake-truth universe on the other hand. They don't say truth doesn't matter, or it's all stories etc (that would be later post-modernists, and even for them it's a gross oversimplification). In fact they critique this (e.g. the use of "alternate facts" and erasing of history in the USSR trials, etc). Their emphasis on psychological & social-cultural motivation is precisely to show the hidden actual truth (e.g. profit motives, social conditioning, etc) behind many actions that pretend to be themselves the "truth".
    - crispinb 8y ago
      > Humans don't operate on truth, they operate on psychological & social-cultural motivation, and use "truth" as a pretext. But I suppose you consider your critique of truth to be true? Forgive the seeming snark. It's not meant unkindly. This kind of thing is not easy to talk about, as philosophy's historical mess shows. OK so its the case (or 'true'!) that most arguments are post hoc rationalisations for positions actually determined by a complex chain of psychological and social-historical causes. I agree. This is not an insight unique to European philosophy. Many disciplines and lines of argument get to that position. The issue becomes how to mitigate such bias effects. My contentions are that (1) the empirical-scientific strand of the Enlightenment does a far better and more historically significant job of this than the philosophical, so your (or Adorno et als) target is already a relatively inconsequential one, and that (2) science does this by contraining its ontology within an etiolated language that mis- or under- represents the real world. What's 'wrong' with the most important heir of the Enlightenment (science), if conceived as an inclusive framework from which to view the world, isn't that it's as myth-infused as pre-Enlightenment thought, but rather that the world it attempts to describe isn't where we actually live.
- bladedtoys 8y ago
  Fascinating summary. But I would suggest that the current rationalist claim is "reason and empiricism tell us the most reasonable thing to believe at a given moment" and is almost a-priori true. This is not to claim it is the final truth or that following it will be catastrophe free: The polio vaccine will fail sometimes. But it is better than any non-rational non-fact based alternative. The old claim "reason leads to ultimate truth" is difficult for a number of reasons. One relates to the ultimate know-ability of reality through our senses. Another is the almost absurd level of over confidence in a given theory. I would also contest the claim that we are more violent and barbaric now than in the past. I believe that is factually incorrect or at least controversial. At any rate, science could be accused of the technical advances that make killing more efficient but not of starting wars or worsening the base instincts and gullibility that underlying the causes of cruelty and barbarism. And I would point out one significant social change reason did bring about. Rationality requires judging people by relevant criterion rather than irrelevant criterion. This leads, after apparently continuous struggle, to increased racial, ethnic etc tolerance. I think we should also distinguish between genuine rational-empiricism and pseudo-science. For example, many of the worst atrocities in the 20th century were justified through a knowingly false and twisted reading of Darwin. These are not rational ideas, they are, in fact, irrational ideas cloaking themselves in an undeserved respectability. I think we should also make another more subtle distinction. There are those who have a preconceived notion and then, through omissions, intentional or otherwise, argue eloquently for it. This contrasts with being genuinely curious and following the facts and thinking where-ever they lead without prejudice. The former is obviously not going to lead to usable reality based ideas.
  - yters 8y ago
    GK Chesterton makes the good point that rigorous rationalism is only valid if you start from true premises. Regardless of how valid one's syllogisms are, if they are based on false premises, then you'll end up insane. That is why GKE insists the insane man tends to be the most consistently rational, but starting from incorrect premises. The notion of "mystery" is that we can apprehend truths that are not always within our ability to rationally dissect, but that does not mean these truths are at odds with what we also rationally understand. A prime example is consciousness. There is no coherent rational explanation of consciousness within our physicalist worldview, since consciousness must be inherently non physical. Hence when rational physicalists try to take their viewpoint to its logical conclusion they must make the incoherent claim, as Daniel Dennett does, that consciousness is an "illusion." If consciousness is an illusion, then what is having the illusion? The self contradiction is because illusion itself presupposes a consciousness that be deceived.
- yters 8y ago
  I think the orthodox Christian approach makes the most sense, a combination of faith and reason. It is undeniable that some essential aspects of life are beyond rational dissection. Yet, on the other hand, this does not entail that life is inherently irrational, and the parts we can rationally comprehend do not contradict the parts that we cannot comprehend. One of the key texts of this concept is Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. The author of Hebrews explains how this seemingly irrational command of God and Abraham's willingness to follow it is actually based on a more fundamental sequence of reasoning, derived from Abraham's hope in a life after death and the resurrection of the body. Kierkegaard seems to have not read Hebrews and instead misinterprets Abraham's sacrifice as an irrational "leap of faith," which is unfortunately how faith is now understood in contemporary culture. This is also the fallacious root of the current "war" between science and religion.
  - behindmyscreen 8y ago
    It’s actually quite deniable. Not being able to explain something doesn’t mean there are supernatural reasons for the unexplained.
    - yters 8y ago
      It's actually logically necessary. This is known in philosophy as the problem of the criterion. Every syllogism starts with premises, and at some point the premises have to be a fundamental given that cannot be further dissected. All of our fields of knowledge have this characteristic. They all have a set of foundational concepts. It is also related to Godel's incompleteness theorem. There are an infinite number of truths that cannot be derived from any finite axiomatic system. These truths are "beyond rational comprehension." If we are able to access these truths then we must have some meta-rational cognitive capability. This is an aspect of what Christianity calls 'faith', i.e. belief in that which cannot be seen, yet which is not an irrational made up belief. One obvious area this shows up in is the concept of infinity. There is no way to derive such a concept from any finite axiom. Since everything we experience in the physical world is finite, yet the concept of infinity is extremely useful in STEM, this leaves us with a dilemma. Either STEM is based on a fundamentally false concept, which is absurd, or we have access to truth beyond the finite realm. This observation was made by Eugene Wigner in his article "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I don't think the critics are right to link kant definition of enlightenment directly to modern times (bureaucracy and technocracy). These are mostly factors of innate social structures that makes people organize to seek comfort rather than curiosity and mystery. At least for a while.
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    I'd be careful about saying they're "innate" to anything; the drive for technological management and domination of life is historically relatively new, it is an Enlightenment project that has carried its way through into popular ideology today. In a way, you're on the same track the authors are arguing for - the Enlightenment project, knowingly or not, started with the goal of dispelling any unknown or supposedly unexplained phenomena by shunning animism and personification - but in doing so the Enlightenment has fostered an ideology of domination of nature and whatever appears natural is natural - this means, among other things, repressive states, economic totality and using people as means to ends.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      The article quotes kant talking about freedom from authority not absurd domination; it's a tiny categorical difference but large in intention. We all like to be free from absurd authority. Trust is a very sensitive topic for human beings.
macando 8y ago
"Learning does not infinitely increase our awareness and autonomy. Sometimes it only contours out our blind spots and inarticulacies." We just get better at defending our own misconceptions.

94 points by diodorus 8y ago

A good view on the involvement of myth in the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment's unconscious project to simply replace the form of myth with thinking disguised as scientific, I'd recommend Horkheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of Enlightenment[0]. [0] The book was re-published as late as 1965. Here's a summary before you read: https://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-dialectic-of-enlightenment/ https://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-dia...

crispinb 8y ago
I don't find the summary particularly promising. So much 20th century European philosophy seems to dodge issues of truth in favour of constructing stories of (psychological & social-cultural) motivation. But I admit to being poorly read in the field, and won't come to a judgement on the basis of a summary. From another angle, I enjoy (if don't quite know what to make of) David Abram's critique of the Enlightenment in his Becoming Animal and (more particularly) The Spell of the Sensuous. His target is really disembodied/symbolic thinking as such, but the Enlightenment might be considered a (proclaimed) victory of that line of human cognitive history.
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  The point of contention here is whether a beautiful ideal of aiming for pure truth as separate from psychological and social-cultural influence is sufficient to talk about real-world projects carried out by real people and the movements formed by those individual projects which developed through bitter and personal disagreements. The three people who helped us understand the effects of society on our thought are highly respected for their insights in helping see through this ideology: Marx, Nietzche and Freud. Each has helped us understand the genealogy of modernist consciousness. I say it's ideological because at heart it is: our motivations don't come from nowhere, even if they are pure. When we look at projects like the Enlightenment we have to step back and use critical tools (read: all the social sciences), rather than take what we see read from authors at face value. An example you might like more is Bertrand Russell's assessment of Aquinas, in which Russell dismisses Aquinas as a philosopher because he claims Aquinas actually started at his conclusion - to prove God exists. But Aquinas, of course, claimed to start from where he should have, with the rational investigation of the world. We can say a very similar thing about Descartes - how did Descartes establish the existence of God within two paragraphs (I'm not joking) of establishing the existence of his own mind even after throwing out all preconceived notions?
  - crispinb 8y ago
    Weaving motivational tales though seems to be entirely undecidable, a process without end or means of resolving disagreement. Much like the sloppier end of evolutionary 'just so' stories. The strand of the Enlightenment with the better defense against this type of critique isn't the Cartesian (philosophy), but the Encyclopedist (science). Abrams is interesting on this - instead of focusing on biases introduced by science's historicity, he addresses the lacunae central to the very project of severing symbolic cognition from its embodied origins.
    - claudiawerner 8y ago
      I should have been more clear: the point here isn't to guess intentions, it's to examine the actual results of the project and its reasons for being (e.g distrust in religious authority which Russell situates in the formation of Protestantism) and to identify the same ideology in thinking today. Tracing the relationship between myth and enlightenment is done in the same way we trace the relationship between the Ancient Greek epics and their philosophy, or the Protestant work ethic and capitalism.
      - crispinb 8y ago
        Yes I understand (though I suspect the distinction between psychological & textual/ideological exegesis might be more ambiguous than you suggest). Nonetheless, it's just weaving stories and comparing interpretations, and there's no objective way to do this (or, put more psychologically, there's no route to generating agreement on the best story). Cf science, which attempts (step by step) to find methodological/algorithmic ways to expunge subjectivities (ask nature, rather than ask yourself). My (undercooked) suggestion is that an Abrams-like analysis may do a better job of showing what is lacking in the science tributary of the Enlightenment. It's not a methodological issue (rooting out ideology), it's a representational one (symbol systems yanked out of their living backdrop miss too much of the real world).
  - PixyMisa 8y ago
    As Jeremy Wolfe said in his Introduction to Psychology lectures on MIT OCW: There's two things to know about Freud - he's wrong and he's dead. The same goes for Marx and Nietzsche.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I don't find the summary particularly promising. So much 20th century European philosophy seems to dodge issues of truth in favour of constructing stories of (psychological & social-cultural) motivation. Humans don't operate on truth, they operate on psychological & social-cultural motivation, and use "truth" as a pretext. We not only lie to others (e.g. saying we want X for justice and truth, but instead we only care of being elected, and we might even harm X with out actions). We also lie to ourselves all the time. And we also have delusions we consider as truths (based on psychological & social-cultural motivation). Those lynching black people, for example, didn't consider themselves bad, but as people doing the good thing, and punishing people that are bad for their community. Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer's starting point is 40 years of carnage (WWI and WWII, plus USSR gulags and the holocaust, Hiroshima, Dresden, etc.) from supposed Enlightened states, and where even those against enlightenment ideas made use of enlightenment methods (e.g. the Nazis building their technical industries, creating rockets and novel weaponry, engineering the elimination of Jews on industrial scale --even using IBM tabulating machines--, and so on). Plus, it's not like Adorno and Hork. propose some bizarro alternative fake-truth universe on the other hand. They don't say truth doesn't matter, or it's all stories etc (that would be later post-modernists, and even for them it's a gross oversimplification). In fact they critique this (e.g. the use of "alternate facts" and erasing of history in the USSR trials, etc). Their emphasis on psychological & social-cultural motivation is precisely to show the hidden actual truth (e.g. profit motives, social conditioning, etc) behind many actions that pretend to be themselves the "truth".
  - crispinb 8y ago
    > Humans don't operate on truth, they operate on psychological & social-cultural motivation, and use "truth" as a pretext. But I suppose you consider your critique of truth to be true? Forgive the seeming snark. It's not meant unkindly. This kind of thing is not easy to talk about, as philosophy's historical mess shows. OK so its the case (or 'true'!) that most arguments are post hoc rationalisations for positions actually determined by a complex chain of psychological and social-historical causes. I agree. This is not an insight unique to European philosophy. Many disciplines and lines of argument get to that position. The issue becomes how to mitigate such bias effects. My contentions are that (1) the empirical-scientific strand of the Enlightenment does a far better and more historically significant job of this than the philosophical, so your (or Adorno et als) target is already a relatively inconsequential one, and that (2) science does this by contraining its ontology within an etiolated language that mis- or under- represents the real world. What's 'wrong' with the most important heir of the Enlightenment (science), if conceived as an inclusive framework from which to view the world, isn't that it's as myth-infused as pre-Enlightenment thought, but rather that the world it attempts to describe isn't where we actually live.
bladedtoys 8y ago
Fascinating summary. But I would suggest that the current rationalist claim is "reason and empiricism tell us the most reasonable thing to believe at a given moment" and is almost a-priori true. This is not to claim it is the final truth or that following it will be catastrophe free: The polio vaccine will fail sometimes. But it is better than any non-rational non-fact based alternative. The old claim "reason leads to ultimate truth" is difficult for a number of reasons. One relates to the ultimate know-ability of reality through our senses. Another is the almost absurd level of over confidence in a given theory. I would also contest the claim that we are more violent and barbaric now than in the past. I believe that is factually incorrect or at least controversial. At any rate, science could be accused of the technical advances that make killing more efficient but not of starting wars or worsening the base instincts and gullibility that underlying the causes of cruelty and barbarism. And I would point out one significant social change reason did bring about. Rationality requires judging people by relevant criterion rather than irrelevant criterion. This leads, after apparently continuous struggle, to increased racial, ethnic etc tolerance. I think we should also distinguish between genuine rational-empiricism and pseudo-science. For example, many of the worst atrocities in the 20th century were justified through a knowingly false and twisted reading of Darwin. These are not rational ideas, they are, in fact, irrational ideas cloaking themselves in an undeserved respectability. I think we should also make another more subtle distinction. There are those who have a preconceived notion and then, through omissions, intentional or otherwise, argue eloquently for it. This contrasts with being genuinely curious and following the facts and thinking where-ever they lead without prejudice. The former is obviously not going to lead to usable reality based ideas.
- yters 8y ago
  GK Chesterton makes the good point that rigorous rationalism is only valid if you start from true premises. Regardless of how valid one's syllogisms are, if they are based on false premises, then you'll end up insane. That is why GKE insists the insane man tends to be the most consistently rational, but starting from incorrect premises. The notion of "mystery" is that we can apprehend truths that are not always within our ability to rationally dissect, but that does not mean these truths are at odds with what we also rationally understand. A prime example is consciousness. There is no coherent rational explanation of consciousness within our physicalist worldview, since consciousness must be inherently non physical. Hence when rational physicalists try to take their viewpoint to its logical conclusion they must make the incoherent claim, as Daniel Dennett does, that consciousness is an "illusion." If consciousness is an illusion, then what is having the illusion? The self contradiction is because illusion itself presupposes a consciousness that be deceived.
yters 8y ago
I think the orthodox Christian approach makes the most sense, a combination of faith and reason. It is undeniable that some essential aspects of life are beyond rational dissection. Yet, on the other hand, this does not entail that life is inherently irrational, and the parts we can rationally comprehend do not contradict the parts that we cannot comprehend. One of the key texts of this concept is Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. The author of Hebrews explains how this seemingly irrational command of God and Abraham's willingness to follow it is actually based on a more fundamental sequence of reasoning, derived from Abraham's hope in a life after death and the resurrection of the body. Kierkegaard seems to have not read Hebrews and instead misinterprets Abraham's sacrifice as an irrational "leap of faith," which is unfortunately how faith is now understood in contemporary culture. This is also the fallacious root of the current "war" between science and religion.
- behindmyscreen 8y ago
  It’s actually quite deniable. Not being able to explain something doesn’t mean there are supernatural reasons for the unexplained.
  - yters 8y ago
    It's actually logically necessary. This is known in philosophy as the problem of the criterion. Every syllogism starts with premises, and at some point the premises have to be a fundamental given that cannot be further dissected. All of our fields of knowledge have this characteristic. They all have a set of foundational concepts. It is also related to Godel's incompleteness theorem. There are an infinite number of truths that cannot be derived from any finite axiomatic system. These truths are "beyond rational comprehension." If we are able to access these truths then we must have some meta-rational cognitive capability. This is an aspect of what Christianity calls 'faith', i.e. belief in that which cannot be seen, yet which is not an irrational made up belief. One obvious area this shows up in is the concept of infinity. There is no way to derive such a concept from any finite axiom. Since everything we experience in the physical world is finite, yet the concept of infinity is extremely useful in STEM, this leaves us with a dilemma. Either STEM is based on a fundamentally false concept, which is absurd, or we have access to truth beyond the finite realm. This observation was made by Eugene Wigner in his article "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".
agumonkey 8y ago
I don't think the critics are right to link kant definition of enlightenment directly to modern times (bureaucracy and technocracy). These are mostly factors of innate social structures that makes people organize to seek comfort rather than curiosity and mystery. At least for a while.
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  I'd be careful about saying they're "innate" to anything; the drive for technological management and domination of life is historically relatively new, it is an Enlightenment project that has carried its way through into popular ideology today. In a way, you're on the same track the authors are arguing for - the Enlightenment project, knowingly or not, started with the goal of dispelling any unknown or supposedly unexplained phenomena by shunning animism and personification - but in doing so the Enlightenment has fostered an ideology of domination of nature and whatever appears natural is natural - this means, among other things, repressive states, economic totality and using people as means to ends.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    The article quotes kant talking about freedom from authority not absurd domination; it's a tiny categorical difference but large in intention. We all like to be free from absurd authority. Trust is a very sensitive topic for human beings.

macando 8y ago

"Learning does not infinitely increase our awareness and autonomy. Sometimes it only contours out our blind spots and inarticulacies." We just get better at defending our own misconceptions.