![]() For Condillac, proper rationality required societies to develop more ‘natural’ ways of communicating. To avoid falling into a trap of false articulacy, and to keep as close as possible to sensuous experience, Condillac was a fan of ‘primitive’ languages in preference to those that relied on abstract ideas. These urges gave rise to passions and desires, then to the development of languages, and on to the full flourishing of the mind. All aspects of human thought grew from our senses, he said – specifically, the ability to be drawn towards pleasant sensations and driven away from painful ones. You might even go so far as to say that the French Enlightenment tried to produce a philosophy without reason.įor the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for example, it didn’t make sense to talk about reason as a ‘faculty’. Against the inwardness of speculative philosophy – René Descartes and his followers were often the target of choice – the philosophes turned outward, and brought to the fore the body as the point of passionate engagement with the world. Many Enlightenment thinkers advocated a polyvocal and playful version of rationality, one that was continuous with the particularities of sensation, imagination and embodiment. Rather than holding that reason was the only means of battling error and ignorance, the French Enlightenment emphasised sensation. In France, the philosophes were surprisingly enthusiastic about the passions, and deeply suspicious about abstractions. ![]() Their Kantian subject was a straw man, as was the dogmatic rationalism of their Enlightenment. The truth is that Hegel and the 19th-century Romantics, who believed they were moved by a new spirit of beauty and feeling, summoned up the ‘age of reason’ to serve as a foil for their own self-conception. However, the Enlightenment was a diverse phenomenon most of its philosophy stood far apart from Kantianism, let alone from Hegel’s version of Kant. He said that the rational subject conceived by Immanuel Kant – the Enlightenment philosopher par excellence – produced citizens who were alienated, dispassionate and estranged from nature, with the murderous rationalism of the French Terror the logical outcome. Hegel, in the early 1800s, was one of the first to go on the offensive. The Enlightenment began with the scientific revolution in the mid-17th century, and culminated in the French Revolution at the end of the 18th. These claims don’t reflect the rich texture of the Enlightenment itself, which placed a remarkably high value on the role of sensibility, feeling and desire. However, to say that the Enlightenment was a movement of rationalism against passion, of science against superstition, of progressive politics against conservative tribalism is to be deeply mistaken. The Enlightenment’s contribution was to add science to this picture of reason, and religious superstition to the notion of passionate enslavement. Since the ancient Stoics, philosophy has generally looked on the passions as threats to liberty: the weak are slaves to them the strong assert their reason and will, and so remain free. The passions – embodied affects, desires, appetites – were forerunners to the modern understanding of emotion. Their collective error is what makes the cliché of the ‘age of reason’ so powerful. These writers identify a pathology in Western thought that equates rationality with positivist science, capitalist exploitation, the domination of nature – even, in the case of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, with Nazism and the Holocaust.īut in holding that the Enlightenment was a movement of reason opposed to the passions, apologists and critics are two sides of the same coin. The pejorative view of the Enlightenment flows from the philosophy of G W F Hegel right through to the critical theory of the mid-20th-century Frankfurt School. Strikingly, this rosy picture of the so-called ‘age of reason’ is weirdly similar to the image advanced by its naive detractors. What we need is a reboot of the Enlightenment, now. The bedrock of modernity, they tell us, is the human capacity to curb disruptive forces with cool-headed reason. ![]() These white knights of progress – such as the psychologist Steven Pinker and the neuroscientist Sam Harris – condemn the apparent resurgence of passion, emotion and superstition in politics. The besieged citadel in need of defending, they say, is the one that safeguards science, facts and evidence-based policy. ![]() On either side of the Atlantic, groups of public intellectuals have issued a call to arms.
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