ASSIGNMENT
Enlightenment philosophy
Submitted to : submitted by :
Dr.Shalini Muhd.
Uvais
Cuk I ECL
28/10/2015
ASSIGNMENT
Enlightenment philosophy
Submitted to : submitted by :
Dr.Shalini Muhd. Uvais
Cuk I ECL
28/10/2015
The Philosophy of Enlightenment
“Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage”
- Kant. The enlightenment has been called as an intellectual tendency, philosophy,literature, language, art, religion, and a political theory which is said to have started since 1680 and ended on the last days of Eighteenth century. It was not only an intellectual movement but created a cultural ambiance of trust in universal and uniform human reason which would help the human kind to discover the truth and solution for their crucial problems. The so called age come to get rid of whole kind of superstitions, prejudices and barbarity and was liberating the human kind from the reliance on mere authority and unexamined tradition. With the idea of progress, namely , the notion that by virtue of the development and exploitation of art, science, and technology with the application of human rationality would definitely represent an overall improvement in the life, morality, and happiness of human beings from old dark age to the present day of civilization, they created two kinds of model for the “reason” as it is called an ‘age of reason’ :
1) The perfect procedure of science which results by reasoning from the particular facts of experiences to universal laws.
2) The pure geometrical, namely, the conclusion of the particular truths from a clear cut and distinct ideas which are universal and called intuitively by the “light of reason” ( it was followed by especially Descartes and his followers).
In England, from Francis Bacon, John Lock, and William Godwin were the theorists of the Enlightenment while in France, Descartes, Voltaire and Diderot did highly reputed contributions for the same. At the same time, Leibniz and Immanuel Kant were doing their work for it’s growth and development in Germany when Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson established a well foundation stone for the Enlightenment theories. Truly speaking, it has grown and developed throughout the world with in years and number of people get encouraged with new-arrived think tank’s established notions.
“The Enlightenment category of universal, which was central to eighteenth century thinkers who sought to transcend national, linguistic, or other divisions, has been both praised as an indispensable tool of a radical social critique and derogated as the conceptual means by which local differences such as race, sex, ethnicity, and class are elided in the name of dubious morality” - M H Abrams
These representations of the Enlightenment, and especially the authority and objectivity of “ reason”, have been challenged from many ways: initially, by actual figures usually involved within the circle of Enlightenment thought, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who advocated for the importance of emotion and instinct, and David Hume, whose skepticism sticked on even the capability and existence of reason; by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and many others such as Roland Barthes, who have developed the critique, originally profounded by Marx and Engels, of the “empire of reason” as a basic foundation of bourgeois ideology; by an alternative, the ever challenging and mysterious tradition of philosophy arriving from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson to Derrida which has stressed the “intrinsic connection of reason with ideological and pragmatic interests and physical survival” ; by the psychoanalytic interpretations generated from Freud and Jung, which have stressed the inferior standing of human behavior is accounted for by reason; by feminisms which have rewritten reason as a predominant and superior notion in male constructions of the world and as internally constrained by the complex analysis of the body structure ; and by various types of poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, which have situated reason as a peculiarly European constructed phenomenon intrinsically and internally tied to class interests and the projects of imperial hegemony, which is too a belief of orientalists.
Generally speaking, the very discussion of the Enlightenment seems introverted to the debate of what is ultimately the ‘reason’ as whether it is opposing emotion or religion or tradition while many of us still believe that they should go hand in hand. At its very heart, reason was from the beginning ideologically created and partialsed, on many levels. Hence, all of these claims and tendencies have challenged the notion of reason to neutrality, impartiality, objectivity, and universality.
Though many of those people were highly traditional and obedient to religious theories, they were too mentally contradicted with the very universal practical and highly truthful scientific theories mainly after the incident of Copperniccus. These stage of contradiction may lead them to the deliberate and forced acceptance of the so called new thought and it may encouraged the profounder to think about it, either.
“Notwithstanding these critiques, which have variously claimed the force since the early twentieth century, the main streams of the Enlightenment continue to have a profound effect on our world. Much Enlightenment thought was underlain by a new scientific vision of the universe inspired by the work of the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727): this conception of a mechanical universe ordered by laws which were scientifically ascertainable eventually displaced the view of the universe as ordered and historically directed by a benevolent divine providence.” -M A R Habib
The very notion of reason proclaimed a profound challenge and authority to previous traditions of thought and institutional and cultural practice as well as belief. Though reliance and dependence on reason was in itself nothing new; nonetheless, the classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle had presented and discovered reason as the human power and source through which we could gain access to ultimate and universal truths that were verily certain. Quite frankly, Medieval Christian philosophy and belief proclaimed and acknowledged that reason was an inevitable and necessary factor of a proper spiritual disposition and mental standing, but it was only one condition that it should be balanced by faith and revelation. In other words, reason was limited and constrained within a wide and broader pattern of human abilities and its limitations were stressed: reason alone could not gain access to God or salvation, nor could it discover the ultimate mysteries and truths of the universe.
The strange thing to the Enlightenment was its insistence on reason as the primary notion and faculty through which we could acquire knowledge, and on its potentially limitless practice and application. The findings and inventions of reason need no longer be limited and constrained by the requirements of faith or the dictates of divine revelation. More above , the holiness and exaltation of reason, of man’s individual capacity for reasoning, effectively and independently undermined reliance on any form of authority, whether it be the authority of the God, the Church, the state, of tradition, convention, or of any powerful individual. It’s successful practice has been seen in Syria and it’s neighbour countries mainly after the Jasmin revolution. This is flourished in modern democracies even today: as Alexis de Tocqueville noted about America, people in general prefer to rely and depend on their own insight (though universal) rather than obey to the authority or orders of others, even of experts.
Three distinguishing monuments of Enlightenment thought were the English thinker Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the French rationalist philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), and the Dutch rationalist thinker Benedict (or Baruch) Spinoza (1632–1677). Bacon’s major philosophical works were The Advancement of Learning (1605) and The New Organon (1620), in which he propounds the method of induction and analysis whereby we generalize on the basis of actual observation of a number of particular occurrences. He proposed that induction, as the method of modern science, was a more effective path
to knowledge than the medieval reliance on religious and traditional reasoning.
“ In The New Organon Bacon insisted that knowledge can arise only from actual observation of nature; the elements of logic, such as the syllogism, which underlie much medieval philosophy, he says, may form a coherent structure within itself but is not necessarily tied to actual fact. A syllogism, for example, could be valid inasmuch as its propositions flow logically,but these propositions could nonetheless be untrue. The only secure way to arrive atknowledge, then, is by a “true induction,” whereby reason is applied to observed facts;only in this way can ideas and axioms be generated”.
Even though certain systems of thought have followed by centuries,Bacon asserts that we must begin anew from this alternative foundation. Up until now,he warns, the human mind has been misled by what he calls “idols” or false notions. He divides these idols into four classes. The first type are “Idols of the Tribe,” which refer to the natural happenings of nature caused by the ignorance or deficiencies of sense and understanding common to all human beings. The next are “Idols of the Cave”: each man, he says, has a private cave or den, through which or from which he sees the world. The cave is a metaphor for an individual’s nature and upbringing: his view of the world will be refracted and distorted by his subjective experiences. The third kind of idols are those of the “marketplace,” again a metaphor
for “the commerce and consort of men”: when men enter into social bonds, a social
discourse is created which gives a sense of “vulgar” in its vagueness and intellectual
insufficiency. Finally, there are “Idols of the Theatre”: these are the systems of philosophers
and learned men which are “merely stage plays” because they represent “worlds
of their own creation” rather than the actual world. The upholders of these previous
systems urge us to view the world through those fictions rather than experiencing it
directly for ourselves.
René Descartes is known as the “father” of modern philosophy. Like Bacon,
Descartes challenged the basic principles of medieval philosophy. In his Discourse on Method he began his thinking in a skeptical mode, doubting all things, including his own senses, understanding, and the reality of the external world, until he could find a
secure and certain foundation on which to build his own system of thought. Descartes
resolved to reject as absolutely false everything as to which he could imagine the least
ground of doub in order to see if any kind of certain knowledge remained. He first
doubted the responding power and deliverances of our sense, since they often deceive us; he then doubted the process of reasoning; he imagined that the entire world might be a delusion. “But, in assuming everything to be false, Descartes concluded: “it was absolutely essential that the ‘I’ who thought this should be somewhat [something], and remarking that this
truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so certain and so assured . . . I came to the conclusion
that I could receive it . . . as the first principle of the Philosophy for which I was seeking.” Descartes came to identify his essential nature or self with the process of thinking, calling himself a “thinking being,” independent of any place or any material circumstances and every happenings. In this way, he discovered his famous dualism or distinction between the mind and the body. “The mind is a thinking substance, whereas the body belongs to the world of space, time, and material extension”. In this way, Descartes propounded a mechanistic view of the world. Descartes inferred from his earlier process of doubt that he could take it as a general rule that the things which we conceive very “clearly and very distinctly” are all true. Descartes took mathematics as his model of knowledge given that its ideas were clear and distinct and that its truths were certain.
Spinoza, was a Jew born in Amsterdam, who had studied interpreted Descartes’ works closely. His own rationalist and unorthodox views led to his expulsion from the Jewish community in 1656 for heresy. He also offended Christian theologians by his unorthodox views of the Bible. Like Descartes, he believed in the primacy of deduction and in a mechanistic view of the universe; however, he did not adopt Cartesian dualism, arguing instead that the universe is composed of a single substance, which he viewed as God, and which is represented differently in the attributes of mind and matter. “In his major work, the Ethics (1677), he urged that the highest good consists in the rational mastery over one’s passions and ultimately in the acceptance of the order and harmony in nature, which is an expression of the divine nature”.
Further emerging Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and David Hume in Britain, Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert in France, as well as Gotthold Lessing in Germany, stood for encouraged more skeptical, rational, and tolerant approaches to religion. “The most common approach was “deism,” which saw divine laws as natural and rational, and dismissed all superstition, miracles, and sacraments”. Bacon and Descartes say what were to become two important strands of Enlightenment thought, empiricism and rationalism respectively. Bacon’s empiricism stated emphasis on our experience and observation of the world; Descartes stressed the use of our reason to arrive at certainc and distinct notions of the world. Another face of Enlightenment thought was materialism, which marks the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes theorised a materialistic view of even the mind, regarding sensation as caused by the impact and interaction of small particles.
In political terms, the Enlightenment produced what should be an ideal state. “Several Enlightenment philosophers made a theory of the “social contract,” or the contract that might be agreed upon by citizens of a state so that social life would be governed by laws and that the ruler’s power and his relation to his people in terms of rights and duties would be defined. Many of these thinkers what men would be like in a state of nature, just before of the idea of nature. Hobbes’ view of this state, as expressed in his Leviathan (1651), he suggests that, without any pure laws or contract, men would be in a actual state of war”. His ‘reasoning is that nature has basically made men equal; from this equality proceeds “diffidence” (by which Hobbes means hostility or aggressiveness), since men, whose principal purpose is self-preservtion, would be competing for the same things. Eventually, war would result, since in order to secure themselves as fully as possible, men would attempt to gain power over as many other people as they could. A third act of quarrel would be the ‘desire for glory and reputation’. In this condition of war, says Hobbes, an world like ‘utopia’ ,there would be no trade or industry, no culture, no arts, letters, or science. There would be “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In this state of nature, there would be no rules, no morality, no justice, and no law: these institutions, says Hobbes belong to man as he lives in society, not in solitude. Even after a social contract is established between persons of a given state, says Hobbes, one state will nonetheless be in a posture of war against other states; this condition, however, unlike that of a war of individuals, may actually promote industry and happiness. One of the major empiricist thinkers of the Enlightenment, and the most important philosopher in the formulation of political liberalism, was John Locke, whose most influential works were An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises on Civil Government, both published in 1690. In the Essay Locke denied Descartes’ view that the mind has “innate ideas,” or ideas that it is simply born with. Rather, the mind is initially a tabula rasa or blank slate upon which our experience of the world is written. Locke argues that all our ideas come from experience, either through sensation or through reflection. We receive distinct ideas of the objects in the external world through our senses, such as the ideas of yellow, white, hard, cold, or soft; we also receive ideas through reflection on the internal operation of our own minds; these ideas include perception, thinking, doubting, reasoning, and believing. These two operations, he says, are “the fountains of knowledge” and there is no other source of knowledge or ideas. Where Locke does agree with Descartes is in his insistence on clear and distinct ideas; as we shall see, like some modern philosophers of language, Locke blamed the misuse or abuse of language for many of our misconceptions about the world, and proposed that language should be made more precise. The Scottish philosopher David Hume developed some of Locke’s empiricist notions toward more radical, skeptical, conclusions. Where Locke had urged that our minds know the external world through ideas, Hume argued that we know only ideas, not the external world itself. We can know external objects only by the “perceptions they occasion,” and we can infer their existence only from “the coherence of our perceptions,” whether they indeed are real or merely “illusions of the senses.” In fact, Locke himself acknowledged that even simple ideas, which were the very core of experience, cannot be proved to correspond with reality, and he admitted that the real essence of things is unknowable (Essay, 271–273, 287, 303). Both Locke and Hume rejected the Aristotelian concept of “substance” as the underlying substratum of reality. Hume develops the skepticism implicit in Locke’s rejection of substance: there are no essences actually in the world, whether we are talking of external objects such as a table, or human identity, or moral concepts such as goodness. All of these are ultimately constructions of our minds, informed largely by custom and habit. Indeed, in Hume’s view, even the human self was not a fixed datum but a construction through a “succession of perceptions”. Hence the very notion of human identity is called into question by Hume. Moreover, in Hume’s eyes, the law of causality, on which the entire thrust of modern science was based and which was hailed as the “ultimate principle” of the universe, has merely a conventional validity, based on nothing more than the authority of custom. What we perceive in the world is not the operation of causality but mere “constant conjunction,” in other words, our own long habit of associating two phenomena.
Hail it as the source of everything that is progressive about the modern world. For them, it stands for freedom of thought, rational inquiry, critical thinking, religious tolerance, political liberty, scientific achievement, the pursuit of happiness, and hope for the future. However, enemies accuse it of 'shallow' rationalism, naïve optimism, unrealistic universalism, and moral darkness."
In short, the enlightenment philosophy changed the mode of the world both systematically and socially. Due to it’s successful domination, different countries enjoyed it results according to their social and political standings like enlightenment absolutism.
Bibliography :
... Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College, 1999. Print.
.... Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 28 Oct. 2015.
.... Habib, M.A.R. Modern Literary Criticism and Theory; 2005.
Enlightenment philosophy
Submitted to : submitted by :
Dr.Shalini Muhd. Uvais
Cuk I ECL
28/10/2015
The Philosophy of Enlightenment
“Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage”
- Kant. The enlightenment has been called as an intellectual tendency, philosophy,literature, language, art, religion, and a political theory which is said to have started since 1680 and ended on the last days of Eighteenth century. It was not only an intellectual movement but created a cultural ambiance of trust in universal and uniform human reason which would help the human kind to discover the truth and solution for their crucial problems. The so called age come to get rid of whole kind of superstitions, prejudices and barbarity and was liberating the human kind from the reliance on mere authority and unexamined tradition. With the idea of progress, namely , the notion that by virtue of the development and exploitation of art, science, and technology with the application of human rationality would definitely represent an overall improvement in the life, morality, and happiness of human beings from old dark age to the present day of civilization, they created two kinds of model for the “reason” as it is called an ‘age of reason’ :
1) The perfect procedure of science which results by reasoning from the particular facts of experiences to universal laws.
2) The pure geometrical, namely, the conclusion of the particular truths from a clear cut and distinct ideas which are universal and called intuitively by the “light of reason” ( it was followed by especially Descartes and his followers).
In England, from Francis Bacon, John Lock, and William Godwin were the theorists of the Enlightenment while in France, Descartes, Voltaire and Diderot did highly reputed contributions for the same. At the same time, Leibniz and Immanuel Kant were doing their work for it’s growth and development in Germany when Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson established a well foundation stone for the Enlightenment theories. Truly speaking, it has grown and developed throughout the world with in years and number of people get encouraged with new-arrived think tank’s established notions.
“The Enlightenment category of universal, which was central to eighteenth century thinkers who sought to transcend national, linguistic, or other divisions, has been both praised as an indispensable tool of a radical social critique and derogated as the conceptual means by which local differences such as race, sex, ethnicity, and class are elided in the name of dubious morality” - M H Abrams
These representations of the Enlightenment, and especially the authority and objectivity of “ reason”, have been challenged from many ways: initially, by actual figures usually involved within the circle of Enlightenment thought, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who advocated for the importance of emotion and instinct, and David Hume, whose skepticism sticked on even the capability and existence of reason; by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and many others such as Roland Barthes, who have developed the critique, originally profounded by Marx and Engels, of the “empire of reason” as a basic foundation of bourgeois ideology; by an alternative, the ever challenging and mysterious tradition of philosophy arriving from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson to Derrida which has stressed the “intrinsic connection of reason with ideological and pragmatic interests and physical survival” ; by the psychoanalytic interpretations generated from Freud and Jung, which have stressed the inferior standing of human behavior is accounted for by reason; by feminisms which have rewritten reason as a predominant and superior notion in male constructions of the world and as internally constrained by the complex analysis of the body structure ; and by various types of poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, which have situated reason as a peculiarly European constructed phenomenon intrinsically and internally tied to class interests and the projects of imperial hegemony, which is too a belief of orientalists.
Generally speaking, the very discussion of the Enlightenment seems introverted to the debate of what is ultimately the ‘reason’ as whether it is opposing emotion or religion or tradition while many of us still believe that they should go hand in hand. At its very heart, reason was from the beginning ideologically created and partialsed, on many levels. Hence, all of these claims and tendencies have challenged the notion of reason to neutrality, impartiality, objectivity, and universality.
Though many of those people were highly traditional and obedient to religious theories, they were too mentally contradicted with the very universal practical and highly truthful scientific theories mainly after the incident of Copperniccus. These stage of contradiction may lead them to the deliberate and forced acceptance of the so called new thought and it may encouraged the profounder to think about it, either.
“Notwithstanding these critiques, which have variously claimed the force since the early twentieth century, the main streams of the Enlightenment continue to have a profound effect on our world. Much Enlightenment thought was underlain by a new scientific vision of the universe inspired by the work of the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727): this conception of a mechanical universe ordered by laws which were scientifically ascertainable eventually displaced the view of the universe as ordered and historically directed by a benevolent divine providence.” -M A R Habib
The very notion of reason proclaimed a profound challenge and authority to previous traditions of thought and institutional and cultural practice as well as belief. Though reliance and dependence on reason was in itself nothing new; nonetheless, the classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle had presented and discovered reason as the human power and source through which we could gain access to ultimate and universal truths that were verily certain. Quite frankly, Medieval Christian philosophy and belief proclaimed and acknowledged that reason was an inevitable and necessary factor of a proper spiritual disposition and mental standing, but it was only one condition that it should be balanced by faith and revelation. In other words, reason was limited and constrained within a wide and broader pattern of human abilities and its limitations were stressed: reason alone could not gain access to God or salvation, nor could it discover the ultimate mysteries and truths of the universe.
The strange thing to the Enlightenment was its insistence on reason as the primary notion and faculty through which we could acquire knowledge, and on its potentially limitless practice and application. The findings and inventions of reason need no longer be limited and constrained by the requirements of faith or the dictates of divine revelation. More above , the holiness and exaltation of reason, of man’s individual capacity for reasoning, effectively and independently undermined reliance on any form of authority, whether it be the authority of the God, the Church, the state, of tradition, convention, or of any powerful individual. It’s successful practice has been seen in Syria and it’s neighbour countries mainly after the Jasmin revolution. This is flourished in modern democracies even today: as Alexis de Tocqueville noted about America, people in general prefer to rely and depend on their own insight (though universal) rather than obey to the authority or orders of others, even of experts.
Three distinguishing monuments of Enlightenment thought were the English thinker Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the French rationalist philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), and the Dutch rationalist thinker Benedict (or Baruch) Spinoza (1632–1677). Bacon’s major philosophical works were The Advancement of Learning (1605) and The New Organon (1620), in which he propounds the method of induction and analysis whereby we generalize on the basis of actual observation of a number of particular occurrences. He proposed that induction, as the method of modern science, was a more effective path
to knowledge than the medieval reliance on religious and traditional reasoning.
“ In The New Organon Bacon insisted that knowledge can arise only from actual observation of nature; the elements of logic, such as the syllogism, which underlie much medieval philosophy, he says, may form a coherent structure within itself but is not necessarily tied to actual fact. A syllogism, for example, could be valid inasmuch as its propositions flow logically,but these propositions could nonetheless be untrue. The only secure way to arrive atknowledge, then, is by a “true induction,” whereby reason is applied to observed facts;only in this way can ideas and axioms be generated”.
Even though certain systems of thought have followed by centuries,Bacon asserts that we must begin anew from this alternative foundation. Up until now,he warns, the human mind has been misled by what he calls “idols” or false notions. He divides these idols into four classes. The first type are “Idols of the Tribe,” which refer to the natural happenings of nature caused by the ignorance or deficiencies of sense and understanding common to all human beings. The next are “Idols of the Cave”: each man, he says, has a private cave or den, through which or from which he sees the world. The cave is a metaphor for an individual’s nature and upbringing: his view of the world will be refracted and distorted by his subjective experiences. The third kind of idols are those of the “marketplace,” again a metaphor
for “the commerce and consort of men”: when men enter into social bonds, a social
discourse is created which gives a sense of “vulgar” in its vagueness and intellectual
insufficiency. Finally, there are “Idols of the Theatre”: these are the systems of philosophers
and learned men which are “merely stage plays” because they represent “worlds
of their own creation” rather than the actual world. The upholders of these previous
systems urge us to view the world through those fictions rather than experiencing it
directly for ourselves.
René Descartes is known as the “father” of modern philosophy. Like Bacon,
Descartes challenged the basic principles of medieval philosophy. In his Discourse on Method he began his thinking in a skeptical mode, doubting all things, including his own senses, understanding, and the reality of the external world, until he could find a
secure and certain foundation on which to build his own system of thought. Descartes
resolved to reject as absolutely false everything as to which he could imagine the least
ground of doub in order to see if any kind of certain knowledge remained. He first
doubted the responding power and deliverances of our sense, since they often deceive us; he then doubted the process of reasoning; he imagined that the entire world might be a delusion. “But, in assuming everything to be false, Descartes concluded: “it was absolutely essential that the ‘I’ who thought this should be somewhat [something], and remarking that this
truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so certain and so assured . . . I came to the conclusion
that I could receive it . . . as the first principle of the Philosophy for which I was seeking.” Descartes came to identify his essential nature or self with the process of thinking, calling himself a “thinking being,” independent of any place or any material circumstances and every happenings. In this way, he discovered his famous dualism or distinction between the mind and the body. “The mind is a thinking substance, whereas the body belongs to the world of space, time, and material extension”. In this way, Descartes propounded a mechanistic view of the world. Descartes inferred from his earlier process of doubt that he could take it as a general rule that the things which we conceive very “clearly and very distinctly” are all true. Descartes took mathematics as his model of knowledge given that its ideas were clear and distinct and that its truths were certain.
Spinoza, was a Jew born in Amsterdam, who had studied interpreted Descartes’ works closely. His own rationalist and unorthodox views led to his expulsion from the Jewish community in 1656 for heresy. He also offended Christian theologians by his unorthodox views of the Bible. Like Descartes, he believed in the primacy of deduction and in a mechanistic view of the universe; however, he did not adopt Cartesian dualism, arguing instead that the universe is composed of a single substance, which he viewed as God, and which is represented differently in the attributes of mind and matter. “In his major work, the Ethics (1677), he urged that the highest good consists in the rational mastery over one’s passions and ultimately in the acceptance of the order and harmony in nature, which is an expression of the divine nature”.
Further emerging Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and David Hume in Britain, Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert in France, as well as Gotthold Lessing in Germany, stood for encouraged more skeptical, rational, and tolerant approaches to religion. “The most common approach was “deism,” which saw divine laws as natural and rational, and dismissed all superstition, miracles, and sacraments”. Bacon and Descartes say what were to become two important strands of Enlightenment thought, empiricism and rationalism respectively. Bacon’s empiricism stated emphasis on our experience and observation of the world; Descartes stressed the use of our reason to arrive at certainc and distinct notions of the world. Another face of Enlightenment thought was materialism, which marks the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes theorised a materialistic view of even the mind, regarding sensation as caused by the impact and interaction of small particles.
In political terms, the Enlightenment produced what should be an ideal state. “Several Enlightenment philosophers made a theory of the “social contract,” or the contract that might be agreed upon by citizens of a state so that social life would be governed by laws and that the ruler’s power and his relation to his people in terms of rights and duties would be defined. Many of these thinkers what men would be like in a state of nature, just before of the idea of nature. Hobbes’ view of this state, as expressed in his Leviathan (1651), he suggests that, without any pure laws or contract, men would be in a actual state of war”. His ‘reasoning is that nature has basically made men equal; from this equality proceeds “diffidence” (by which Hobbes means hostility or aggressiveness), since men, whose principal purpose is self-preservtion, would be competing for the same things. Eventually, war would result, since in order to secure themselves as fully as possible, men would attempt to gain power over as many other people as they could. A third act of quarrel would be the ‘desire for glory and reputation’. In this condition of war, says Hobbes, an world like ‘utopia’ ,there would be no trade or industry, no culture, no arts, letters, or science. There would be “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In this state of nature, there would be no rules, no morality, no justice, and no law: these institutions, says Hobbes belong to man as he lives in society, not in solitude. Even after a social contract is established between persons of a given state, says Hobbes, one state will nonetheless be in a posture of war against other states; this condition, however, unlike that of a war of individuals, may actually promote industry and happiness. One of the major empiricist thinkers of the Enlightenment, and the most important philosopher in the formulation of political liberalism, was John Locke, whose most influential works were An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises on Civil Government, both published in 1690. In the Essay Locke denied Descartes’ view that the mind has “innate ideas,” or ideas that it is simply born with. Rather, the mind is initially a tabula rasa or blank slate upon which our experience of the world is written. Locke argues that all our ideas come from experience, either through sensation or through reflection. We receive distinct ideas of the objects in the external world through our senses, such as the ideas of yellow, white, hard, cold, or soft; we also receive ideas through reflection on the internal operation of our own minds; these ideas include perception, thinking, doubting, reasoning, and believing. These two operations, he says, are “the fountains of knowledge” and there is no other source of knowledge or ideas. Where Locke does agree with Descartes is in his insistence on clear and distinct ideas; as we shall see, like some modern philosophers of language, Locke blamed the misuse or abuse of language for many of our misconceptions about the world, and proposed that language should be made more precise. The Scottish philosopher David Hume developed some of Locke’s empiricist notions toward more radical, skeptical, conclusions. Where Locke had urged that our minds know the external world through ideas, Hume argued that we know only ideas, not the external world itself. We can know external objects only by the “perceptions they occasion,” and we can infer their existence only from “the coherence of our perceptions,” whether they indeed are real or merely “illusions of the senses.” In fact, Locke himself acknowledged that even simple ideas, which were the very core of experience, cannot be proved to correspond with reality, and he admitted that the real essence of things is unknowable (Essay, 271–273, 287, 303). Both Locke and Hume rejected the Aristotelian concept of “substance” as the underlying substratum of reality. Hume develops the skepticism implicit in Locke’s rejection of substance: there are no essences actually in the world, whether we are talking of external objects such as a table, or human identity, or moral concepts such as goodness. All of these are ultimately constructions of our minds, informed largely by custom and habit. Indeed, in Hume’s view, even the human self was not a fixed datum but a construction through a “succession of perceptions”. Hence the very notion of human identity is called into question by Hume. Moreover, in Hume’s eyes, the law of causality, on which the entire thrust of modern science was based and which was hailed as the “ultimate principle” of the universe, has merely a conventional validity, based on nothing more than the authority of custom. What we perceive in the world is not the operation of causality but mere “constant conjunction,” in other words, our own long habit of associating two phenomena.
Hail it as the source of everything that is progressive about the modern world. For them, it stands for freedom of thought, rational inquiry, critical thinking, religious tolerance, political liberty, scientific achievement, the pursuit of happiness, and hope for the future. However, enemies accuse it of 'shallow' rationalism, naïve optimism, unrealistic universalism, and moral darkness."
In short, the enlightenment philosophy changed the mode of the world both systematically and socially. Due to it’s successful domination, different countries enjoyed it results according to their social and political standings like enlightenment absolutism.
Bibliography :
... Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College, 1999. Print.
.... Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 28 Oct. 2015.
.... Habib, M.A.R. Modern Literary Criticism and Theory; 2005.
No comments:
Post a Comment