Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

Considerations contra

Top o' the Stack

Comments

[Ben]

Bill,

You're point about doubt being the engine of inquiry is well-taken. It reminds me of a post you did years back about the left and critical thinking: To think critically, you argue, is not necessarily to subvert or undermine the status quo as leftists seem to assume uncritically. After critically examining something, someone could be in favor of it. The same applies to doubt.

There's nothing that I, as a layperson, can add here that those far more wise and erudite than me haven't already expressed. This is a monstrous subject, mandating caution. What I will say, and I detect you perceive this too when bring up the slippery-slope fallacy in your substack article, that it's too reductive to identify one cause or intellectual error as responsible for our civilization's predicament. Malcolm, whose writing I've appreciated for almost as long as I've appreciated yours, lays the blame at the Enlightenment's skepsis. I'd contend that the "universal acid" of radical doubt was introduced centuries earlier with Descartes, and thus Malcolm's culprit emerges then, with the advent of philosophical modernity, from which the Enlightenment is later born, the product of the intervening politics and religious wars of Europe in synthesis with the philosophical problems in epistemology and metaphysics Rene kicked off. I know there are post-liberals who would go back farther still in intellectual history, singling out Ockham's nominalism as the place where everything took a turn for the worse. But again, our decline is not merely a debate between the mistaken geniuses through the last five centuries. The body politic, not just the intelligentsia, is infected.

Outside of a mass revival of Christianity, what I would propose, though, is not the restoration of classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers per se but the Classical thought that was intertwined with it. For example, I'm of the opinion that if prominent conservatives didn't flatter the masses with the demagogic travesties of "our democracy" and "rights"-talk, appealing to base desires of the lowest common denominator, and instead insisted on deploying the rhetoric of republicanism, mixed constitutionalism, the common good, virtue, and natural law as much as "freedom" and "equality" are bandied about in public discourse today, then it would actually ennoble the average voter. That's pretty quixotic, I admit.

[Malcolm Pollack]

Bill,

Thanks for posting this; I've linked to it over at my place. (I'm of a mind to get the blog going again.) I'm hoping I can clarify my position in such a way as to bring us into general agreement, but I haven't posted a reply yet. (I did notice, too, that the passage you quoted contained both a typo and a misspelling, since corrected in my post.)

Ben,

I agree that the seeds of the problem predate the main period of the Enlightenment, although I do consider Descartes to be a proto-Enlightenment thinker who can fairly be included in that movement. (I've also even endorsed the case, as made so well by Richard Weaver, for blaming Ockham and the Nominalists.)

I agree also that it would be facile to lay the blame for our decline on any one cause. Having said that, though, I do think that the great engine of skeptical inquiry, which the men of the Enlightenment rightly imagined as a great digging-machine for Truth, got badly out of control in ways they did not foresee, and ended up undermining the very foundations of the civilization they had intended to advance and adorn.

[BV]

Malcolm,

I am happy to see that you have surfaced from the slough of despond and are back in the groove. I have just read some of the posts of yours to which you linked. I share your high opinion of the neglected Richard Weaver. You say, >>Mr Weaver traces the cracking open of the abyss all the way back to William of Ockham and the birth of nominalism — the idea that there is nothing more to the things in this world than the things themselves.<<

That is a good pithy formulation. Is it his or yours? Nominalism is a narrowly technical phil. topic but it also has broad cultural implications, as you appreciate. But exactly what these implications are is not easy to say. You approvingly quote Weaver: "The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses." This is at least half-right in that nominalism, according to which particulars alone are real, naturally links up with empiricism according to which all genuine knowledge derives from the senses. What the senses reveal are particulars not universals. "I see the horse, Plato, I do not see horseness." So empiricism naturally leads to nominalism. But does nominalism "banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect" ? Granted, it banishes universals, but it does not banish supersensible particulars such as God and the devil, Luther's favorite supersensible entities. And so Luther, as I think you suggest in one of your posts, can make common cause with Ockham and the nominalists against Aristotle whom Luther hated with a passion. The upshot is that for Luther the nominalist, the transcendent is retained in the form of God, a particular being, and his Word which is found in the particular words of a particular book. Away with speculation, a priori arguments, mystical intuition! Sola scriptura! Read the Bible. Theology is not speculative knowledge but Bible-based.

[BV]

Malcolm,

There is another wrinkle to this. I take credit for having cured you of your scientism. But we both have high respect for natural science. Nominalism and empiricism are parts of the Via Moderna in reaction to the Via Antiqua of Plato and Aristotle. Both nominalism and empiricism support experimentalism in the knowledge of nature in reaction to the authority of Aristotle. Modern science could not get off the ground without geniuses like Descartes and Galileo who discounted the authority of Aristotle and the Roman Church. So what I am saying to you is that we must not make a bogeyman out of nominalism given its role in the development of modern natural science.

[Malcolm Pollack]

Hi Bill,

That "pithy formulation" of nominalism is my own, and I'm happy that you liked it. (It just seemed like a good quick way to sum it up.)

I have a welter of thoughts in response to your stimulating comments about nominalism, and my impulse (it doesn't help that I just saw off some visitors who dropped by with an excellent bottle of whisky) is to blurt them out right here and now. (Why, for example, should we limit the scope of the supersensible merely to "particulars"? Perhaps we should, but I can't see clearly why.) I've found, though, that when I indulge that impulse here I often regret my haste (it's usually good enough for most places, but not here!). So I will add this to the reply I already owe you about the poison-pill embedded in the Enlightenment.

You are right to take credit, more than anyone else, for my disillusionment with scientism, and I owe you an enormous debt of gratitude for that. But I will say that modern science hardly seems nominalistic to me; despite its vaunted self-sufficiency, it rests nevertheless on the assumption of intelligible laws and categories. The real distinction, it seems to me, is that it jettisons the transcendent, and prefers to smuggle in the laws and categories -- all that mind-bogglingly glorious logos -- without having to say anything about where it all comes from!

[Malcolm Pollack]

P.S.

Bill, you wrote:

"Nominalism is a narrowly technical phil. topic but it also has broad cultural implications, as you appreciate. But exactly what these implications are is not easy to say."

Au contraire! -- they are bashing us over the head every day.