• Tag Archives enlightenment
  • How Are We?

    Lughnasa                                     Waning Harvest Moon

    In preparation for my presentation, Spiritual Resources for Humanists, I have come across two mentions of a critique of Enlightenment thought’s emphasis on individualism.  In one instance the critique compares Western individualism with the more integrated person of Taoist thought, one with the Tao, or with the more communal sensibility of the East in general.  In another instance individualism lies at the root of contemporary nihilistic ideas.  Life’s a bitch, then you die.

    These two critiques I know now only in their casual clothes, not in their full dress argument though I intend to hunt them down as I work.  My first instinct is to bristle, to lean into the obvious benefits of individualism:  creativity, activist politics, a chance to flourish as an individuals gifts and dreams suggest, personal liberty.  My second instinct is to note that even the most individualistic of philosophical stances cannot extricate a person from family, from socialization, from nation, from history.

    Then, once my bristles lie back down and I quit pawing the earth, I move to a possibility that neither the more communal and integrated inflection nor the individually inflected position has it right, that the reality is more dynamic, at some times we Westerners are as communal and familial as the East while at other time the individuality of an Easterner comes to the fore, both depending on the particular situation, era, motivation.

    This is all before I sit down to think about it.  At first I defend my intuitive position, then I ameliorate and finally I move to the dialectic.  All without benefit of much reflection or introspection.

    That comes next.


  • Clean Teeth. Legislation. Western Civ.

    Spring                                                                       Waning Bloodroot Moon

    Dangerous driving conditions tomorrow. Winter storm warning.  Who stole my spring?

    Into the city twice today, once to get my teeth cleaned and a second time for a Sierra Club meeting on legislative basics.  The teeth cleaning, an every 6 months visit, has become routine by now.  Mary, the dental hygienist I saw today, complimented on my teeth-brushing.  That feels a bit to me like being told, good boy, you cleaned your plate.  Mary has a gentle way with her and worked hard to convince me to take extra good care of my teeth.  It’s important for overall health, especially as we age.

    On both trips listened to another lecture series, this one on Western Civilization, part II.  It focuses on the 500+ years in which modernism arose.  This is ground I’ve been over from several perspectives over the years, but each time it gets a bit clearer and the puzzle pieces seem to fit together better.  Modernism and the Enlightenment are key to understanding our current political, cultural, social and economic conditions, so it’s hard to become over educated about them.  What I enjoy now is finding connections between, say, Chinese history and Western.

    I’m on lecture 9 already.  Just finished the Reformation, ground I know pretty well, but it never hurts to hear it put in the larger socio-political context.

    The economic and environmental situation we find ourselves in now can be traced back to this period, both the good and the bad.  More later.  I’m tired.


  • More on Liberalism. Not there yet.

    Lughnasa                              Waxing Harvest Moon

    Another day spent happily with my nose in The Contested Enlightenment, parsing out threads of intellectual history that I can then weave together into a new tale, one that clarifies liberalism in the United States today and, also, the place Unitarian-Universalism, a liberal faith, has in that larger context.

    Liberalism proceeds from three high-powered engines: reason, liberty and individualism.  It is the individual who is central in liberalism in all its forms and liberty creates the protected space around the person that ensures expression of their individuality.  The source of the break away from the old monarchical, aristocratic, traditional and ecclesiastical authority lay in a newly aroused faith in the ability of human reason as the key to truth.  Logic, evidence, skepticism and radical investigation of such matters as revelation, the divine right of kings, the feudal caste structure, and precedent peeled away their nakedness.  They simply did not make sense.

    The enlightenment itself stands for the light of reason casting off the darkness of the ancien regime.   Its roots lay in the new empirical methods of Galileo, Copernicus, Francis Bacon.  These men and their brethren advanced the now commonplace notion that one must gather evidence, data from the world before making a conclusion about scientific fact.  Thus, consulting a theological or scholastic assumption of human priority in the great chain of being and using that conclusion to place the earth in the center of the solar system, indeed, the universe might well be true, but if it is true then data gathered from telescopes and manipulated through mathematical formula should confirm it.   If they don’t, and they didn’t, it is the traditional conclusion that gets shelved among yesterday’s ideas.

    Further back in time even than the emergence of early science and the philosophical work of Descartes and Spinoza, however, was critical work, for liberalism at any rate, by Petrarch and his humanist buddies, the development of a nascent individualism, a notion of the worth of the person and their unique qualities.