Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Posted here Tuesday, June 29, 2004 at 10:18:14 AM     The enlightenment. The conventional view is as follows The Legacy of the Enlightenment http://learning.berkeley.edu/robertholub/research/essays/Legacy_of_Enlightenment.pdf Since Enlightenment thinkers promulgated a world view that undermined traditional values and doctrines, it was inevitable that they would provoke rejoinders and objections from those who felt threatened. Many of the most heralded figures in the Enlightenment engaged in debates with representatives of the ancien regime, whose ideas and ideals in politics, religion, aesthetics, and philosophy were suddenly called into question. Indeed, the history of the Enlightenment can be written as a series of conflicts between a new approach to nature and human endeavors, on the one hand, and the retrograde and futile attempts to counter this approach, on the other. This is a false choice. It forces the humane and non discrete theorists to be idnetified with retrograde thinking. The real choice going forward is between a reductionistic mechanical digital approach vs a poetic, indeterminate world of infinite variation and uncalculability. In some instances this sort of anti-Enlightenment critique seeks to recognize dimensions of human activity that are left unilluminated by enlightened thought, thus demonstrating that light has been shed on only a portion of human existence, and that the human being in his entirety has been ignored. ********