On Jul 5, 11:35 am, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote: > Thanks Chaz - a good read. Well-balanced yet still charged with > something worthwhile.
Thanks - you liked it batter than my 'masters' at Sussex. It's odd reading it again after a year. There is so much more I wanted to say but was juggling between wanting to present a good academic essay and not offending the discipline I was writing in. In the end I pulled too many punches. Even so the reaction to it was patronising and reactionary. One comment was "If only he had read Harrington, Chaz would have thought otherwise" - which is complete bullshit. Interesting to note that your bibliography is > similar to much Sue got through in her research methods MA at > Manchester. If we leave aside the reasons for the production of your > essay, I'm struck that claims about 'interest' in the Enlightenment > aren't true - I mean this in the obvious sense that we wouldn't find > anyone if we went on a pub crawl. Quite how we can really discover > origins of terms like Enlightenment seems set interests now and I like > the way you address this. I think the 'interest is clear, though I did not push it home enough. The E is an invention, a meta-narritive upon which careers in Intellectual History are based. There is some argument about the birth of the idea within IH but too many people have taken it as an assumption, and based books and articles on it as if it was an a priori concept that an attack upon it, or a description of its roots is a personal attack upon the fabric of the discipline. The Enlightenment has become their most important Shibboleth. THe claim is that only IH people are allowed to define what it means. Me, I like to unpack myths - not accept them. And Kant never once said THE enlightenment, and neither Smith, nor Hume - the word was never in their vocabulary. > > The more important issue is no doubt why there is so little spread of > "enlightenment" into the village idiot population. My own interest is > why they have been included in the vote process. This is not some > swipe at letting low IQ in - more a wonder on whether power-interests > are at work in ways we are not spotting. We've both been in front of > enough classes to know how hard teaching is. I'd have readily wired > my lot up to an 'enlightenment button' on the bad days! Wel, now that would all depend on what you mean by 'enlightenment'. As far as I can see that is nothing particular about the 18thC. The entire time from c1450 to the present is in a process of Enlightenment in science, and religion taking the backseat to allow that to happen. However, IH is itself makes the move towards being unenlightened in its use of Enlightenment. It requires students to adopt this mythical account of its own object of study like any religion might. Uncritical learning at any level is why we find teaching so difficult. Students tend to want us to tell then the 'facts'. This is part of the reason I liked teaching 10 year olds - many of them still have genuinely inquiring minds and can ask difficult questions, if they have not been 'got at' by mainstream teachers. > > I take another tack on modernity, but that's another story (broadly > it's all science and we aren't rid of 'dark forces'). This would be > 'analytic' rather than 'immanent' critique. Inside your well-written > work, I find a story on 'fashion'. You spot a desire to 'dress' the > real story in 'fine words' and 'positive generality' and are clearly > not swayed by them like so many academics. I take that as a great compliment. On could say Hume attacks > Reason - I'm rusty but stuff like 'rationality should be slave to the > passions'. He did say that - but it was in recognition that passion is what gets us up in the morning, passion is what makes it important to think, to do , and to be. Passion drives Reason. It's not an attack on reason, though, but its telling it like it is. Habermas was forever trying to 'extirpate ideology' to > leave Reason the only force and Marx even unhappy with rights because > they were too individualised - both critical of much otherwise called > Reason (instrumental rather than communicative). Not clear what you are sting here. > > Horkheimer and Adorno could be summarised thus 'How can the progress > of modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people > from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help > create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, > knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop > lethal weapons of mass destruction? Reason, they answer, has become > irrational'. We might ask how so little has changed since they wrote > this. They claimed the whole of thinking needed repair and the whole > of society had to change. Of course, this is utterly apparent in the > Bacon they pin instrumental reason on - society is plagued by Idols. > The Idol of the theatre is clearly at work in your last paragraph - > groups making sure they are attached to 'the good' (fashionable) and > not the old and bad. Ah yes - its a shame I did not enlist Bacon to help with the essay. - but I think my 'masters' would have been more angry than they were at me. I love his metaphor. He was a clear thinking, but demonstrates the foreignness of the past; at first reading he can seem idiosyncratic a second reading we can see more clearly. A clear case for why we need to adopt a contextual approach - but no be subsumed by it. Bacon speaks for today and is worthy of refurbishment. We also owe him the equation "power/knowledge" that Foucault claimed as his own. > > The question for me is whether science is now producing something > workable on human nature. I believe it is and that the key issue is > about how this could be in all human hands rather than an elite - > which is where the philosophy or 'professional academe' has remained. > In terms of this kind of study of the Enlightenment, the studies > themselves remain instrumental in being set in various 'Brownie point' > systems and we do nothing about this. What might it mean to write > other than as a functionary in such a system? I'm not convinced that science has the equipment to do that. The main reason for the disconnect between what we do and how science describe it is that we are only minimally natural. In a sense there is no human nature only human culture. Science insists that what we DO, how we act, is 'behaviour', it looks for the reasons in terms of utility, genetic determinability, evolutionary psychology, survival, social hierarchies, are reducible to generalities. I just don't think that Pet scans can tell science what it feels like to love or hate. I feel that such things are not reducible to neurones firing, though I insist that love is a physical phenomenon of the brain. What is important about it, to humans will never be the neural connections, the hormones and the evolutionary imperative. What is important about the human condition is what things mean in the social and historical context - both of which are, on a day to day basis, invisible. What we like to think of as human nature is actually what we take for granted that underlies everything we do - it is on fact our culturation. It gives us what Zizeck calls the 'unknown knows' - the taken for granteds, the endemic assumptions. Science has no access to that, maybe anthropology does. But I think we all have access to that. It takes a humanist to step outside that to look back in, not a scientist. > > One can make very reasonable arguments to power and just be told to > 'fuck off'. That is the reaction I got to my essay.:) My own view is that academic learning and school > ejukation are more about learning your place in the pack than a > society of Reason. That is exactly what I get from my MA. By the time I did my dissertation I was reduced to offering a mechanical piece of shit. I though Sussex , given its history would be a little more understanding of radical spirit. But its down to individual personalities in the end, with their petty kingdoms. A line into this in the history of thought might > not concern 'Outram's capsule' but a wider history of 'no change' and > what lies in that. This does not suit academics, other than > scientists, who work by excluding it as far as they can as Idols (the > interference of village idiots). Other academics really should be > more engaged with the 'dark side' of why Enlightenment does not work - > something I suspect they ignore because they can get away with > repeated plagiarism from convenient sources. > > These connotations stand against confusion, darkness and ignorance, > notions > that no one would wish to be associated with > > So what, in the 'grand light', is the 'mechanism' to evade this > Other? Can we find this now and can we track it back to the 18th > century and even pre-modernity? Does it work behind 'fine words'? Is > there a problem with argument going back to the pre-Socratics that is > about what it excludes? And some state of mind for 'decision' that is > always secret in the sense of not being amenable to demonstration as > required in science? Is there something about this form of academic > history that is stuck up itself and wants to believe in the > Enlightenment and use it as 'grounding' instead of pursuing more > scientific study because its people are incompetent? Nigel Spivey, a Classical historian once told me that the Greeks could believe 12 different incompatible things before breakfast and were not perturbed by that. In a world constructed by parables and myth, you have to put logos to one side and seem these things are a means to an end. A way to offer a child's understanding of the world - the big scary world that is full of hurt and confusion. What one can accept in the ancient past one does not expect to find in the 21st century. IH shouts loudly in its condemnation of what they cal 'whig' history - the history of progress, and of other forms of historicism (of the type reduced to rubble by Popper); they also attack all forms of anachronism with glee and demand that we adopt a fully contextualised history. And then they demand that we accept the grand myth of the Enlightenment. I don't think science is going to help here, but a bit of common sense and self awareness might! The amazing paradox here is that the adoption of the concept is anti-enlghtenment; a sort of performative self criticism. > > I only ask mate and I get the feeling you were in the guise of these > words. Reason is critiqued, so I'd have asked for a bit of a re-write > on what you were getting at there. Reads like polemic - which I hold > as a good thing in these areas. I don't know if you've tried Bacon - > the style of writing is often lick-arse and I'd bet it would take an > age to get to the Idols for a beginner. One still finds this in > academic text, with 'grounding figures' replacing the King's ass. You > say something like this politely. Most of my students still want to > rush to closure rather than do something argumentative like your > piece. I liked it. You are right - I did fall into polemic. I was really angry about this issue. After my mum died and I wanted so much to go back to school, and then having to postpone due to getting throat cancer, I was really anticipating my return to a bit of formal study. I considered it a real treat to have the leisure to go back to school. Reading it back - I can taste the dissappointment, and the restraint. Thanks for reading it!! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to epistemology@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to epistemology+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
