Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

Malcolm Pollack laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation. 

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or perhaps jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up.  And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the  older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack.  So if you owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties.  As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it.  Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list.

But is the Enlightenment the problem?  Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed.  Now science brings enlightenment and the  enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia.  Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought.  (Ernst Cassirer is worth reading on this.)  Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down.  The cosmogonic myths were called into question.  Doubt, as I like to say, is the engine of inquiry.  Doubt is a driver, a motor.  Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden.  Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious.  But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and whatnot that had been handed down, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense.  In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment.  Doubt, its motor, is therefore good.

Skepsis need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus.  But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt.  If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle.  I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise."  (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.)  I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment  involved a faith in Reason and in the power of Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot.*

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical.  (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses.) Doubt is good.  But good things can be taken too far.  So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable.  Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the self-evidence or objective certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right.  But it is one-sided.  The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically.  It is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following:  is it real as people say?  Is it truly valuable?  Is it true?  Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense?  Is the explanation truly explanatory?  Is a certain hypthesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)?  Is there evidence for it?  Does the earth really rest on a turtle?  Is it turtles all the way down?  Does it function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor?  Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving it by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing?  Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power.  But is is also diabolical.  Lucifer the light-bearer becomes drunk on his own power and blinded by his own light. He will not obey.  He will not recognize any authority other than his own will.  His mind is not for minding any antecedent reality.  He will not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself.  He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another.  In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."   I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) -- not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.)  Zwei --> zwo --> two --> duplicity.  Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity. 

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition.  How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests? 

I don't know.  I do know that Islam is not the answer.  And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. 

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas.  What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry.  It needs skepticism.  It needs philosophy.  What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world.  This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess.  Perhaps Kant's "Copernican revolution" 'paved the way for' conceptual relativism despite Kant's  not being a conceptual relativist.  That's one example.

_____________________________

*The greatest figure in the German Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).  He famously remarks in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787, first ed. 1781), "I have found it necessary to deny reason in order to make room for faith."  Now how does that jive with what I wrote in the preceding paragraph?  I can't explain this now; it is just too complicated!  This is  what i call the invocation of blogospheric privilege. Brevity is the soul of blog.  This being so, I am justified in this venue of just stopping.

 

Comments

[Malcolm Pollack]

Thanks, Bill, for that thoughtful response. Your reply hit all the points on which I am myself so deeply troubled and conflicted. I do find myself very much in broad agreement with your post.

I think you are right that it was not doubt, but Reason, that the Enlightenment placed topmost. But it is also true that one of the fathers of the Enlightenment, Descartes, chose radical doubt as his starting point: Sic autem rejicientes illa omnia, de quibus aliquo modo possumus dubitare... ("While we thus reject all of which we can entertain the smallest doubt..."), leading to his seminal insight that "We cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt."

Of course, if we were all Descartes today, I doubt we'd be in this awful fix. It seems to me that the reconditioning of human reason that the Enlightenment laid out was a potent tool, of tremendous power, that like all powerful tools had the possibility of great danger if used without caution and understanding. I fear that in the present day the users of these tools have discarded, or lost, the habits of mind -- respect for the wisdom of tradition and the reality of human nature foremost among them -- that made it possible to use the great gifts of the Enlightenment safely.

This is a more subtle point than I made in my original post. The question might have been: was it inevitable that the tools of the Enlightenment would someday fall into the hands of a people that no longer knew how to use them wisely, with catastrophic results?

[Whitewall]

It is a rare treat to post here, thanks. "Geezerism" has its benefits..

The Western Enlightenment or any enlightenment has never touched Islam for sure. But I wonder, in view of our current culture and general rot within it, if there is not a complete lack of enlightenment within the modern Left? Modern being since about 1900. No matter what name the Left uses--progressive, liberal, socialist, communist, social democrat, the means to their goals are the same. There is always a large pool of poor waiting to be exploited with promises of "equality". At the same time, there is always a new crop of 20 year olds to use for energy. These two groups are easily manipulated by emotion--the only driving force behind the Left. Reason does not have a chance against the simplicity of emotion.

Maybe this is why the Left never changes or evolves to something deeper than base emotion--no need to. If there is no need to, no "enlightenment" is needed. Rinse and repeat. Here we are.

[Bill Vallicella]

You're welcome, Whitehall.

Good analysis; I agree completely. The Left is emotion-driven.

[Bill Vallicella]

Malcolm,

If you think Descartes (1596-1650) is a father of the Enlightenment, why stop with him? Go back to al-Ghazali (b. 1058) whose "Deliverance from Error" clearly anticipates Descartes' hyperbolic doubt. And then there is Augustine (354-430) another seeker of certain knowledge who anticipated the cogito with his *si fallor, sum,* "If I am mistaken, then I am."

[Malcolm Pollack]

Well, that's fair enough, Bill. Of course the roots of the Enlightenment are deep, and doubt was hardly a 17th-century invention.

But as far as the modern history of the West goes, it wasn't until the Enlightenment that the "universal acid" really began to bite, and bite hard. Both Augustine and Ghazali managed to doubt, yet retain their faith -- and such were the conditions of their times that doubt did not consume God and tradition, and just about everything else, as it has in the post-Enlightenment West. Something's different now.

[Bill Vallicella]

My point was that the Enlightenment -- capital 'E' -- was a fairly circumscribed period of time and that Descartes should not be included within it. But then your point may only have been that Descartes was a precursor in which case my point was that the precursors stretch all the way back to the ancient Greeks.

[Malcolm Pollack]

Hi Bill,

I think of Descartes as belonging to the Enlightenment -- indeed, as I said, as being one of its "founding fathers". But my real question is about how doubt "escaped the laboratory" in the post-Enlightenment era, and began to ravage the cultural landscape. Irreligion, wholesale rejection of tradition, and moral relativism -- the latter just doubt masquerading as a moral absolute -- have had, as I am sure you would agree -- a terribly, and I believe irreversibly, corrosive effect on Western culture.

[Bill Vallicella]

Malcolm,

If the Enlightenment is the Age of Reason, then Descartes kicks it off.

I agree with your third sentence.

There is the question "how doubt escaped the laboratory," but a more important one is how we can stop and partially reverse the current trend, but without 'fascist' methods, e.g., the imposition of Sharia or some non-Islamic equivalent thereof, or by a leftist totalitarian dictatorship.

[Malcolm Pollack]

Yes, Bill, yours is the far more important question; mine is just a puzzle for historians and philosophers. But I am not at all optimistic that your question has any good answer, and so I fear that we are likely headed for "interesting times".

[Bill Vallicella]

We need a broad coalition of the sane which would include libertarians, the few liberals who haven't lost their minds, and most conservatives, with each subgroup tempering its own tendency toward extremism.

We may have one last chance in the coming prez election. But if Hillary wins, then the Benedict Option becomes very attractive.

[Malcolm Pollack]

We need a broad coalition of the sane which would include libertarians, the few liberals who haven't lost their minds, and most conservatives, with each subgroup tempering its own tendency toward extremism.

I used to hope for this, and believe it was possible, but now, to my sorrow, I just can't see how it is ever going to happen. With every passing day, and every tick of the demographic clock, we move faster and faster in the opposite direction, and I can see in America today nothing even remotely resembling a coherent political opposition on the Right. As I wrote in my letter to you, I think we have slipped past the 'event horizon', and all future timelines now must pass through the singularity. What form that will take, and what will come after, I can barely imagine -- but I don't think it will be pleasant for anyone.

[David Bagwill]

Perhaps I'm overly sensitive to the subject, having just finished a spate of dystopian novels (the latest being the excellent Maddaddams trilogy by Margaret Atwood) - but I share your scepticism, Malcolm. The 'event horizon' - which I sometimes equate with the Nazi atrocities - having been passed, we will continue on the downward plunge until society finds a new angle of repose - that, in the long run, will be pleasant only for the elite.
Resistance may be futile, but we can stand as witnesses.