[lit-ideas] Re: Is the Enlightenment a Myth ?
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 06:22:25 -0700 (PDT)
--- Teemu Pyyluoma <teme17@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > The problem is that "Enlightenment values" doesn't
> > offer the kind of solid ground they believe it to
> > be.
> > For example, many Enlightenment thinkers would not
> > have described themselves as rationalists. Jon
> > Wilson,
> > a historian at King's College, London, makes the
> > case
> > that the Enlightenment had far more to do with
> > anti-rationalism - thinkers like David Hume or
> Adam
> > Smith argued in favour of a much more empirical
> > approach of observation to understand the messy,
> > muddle of reality.
> >
> I think the author (of the Guardian piece, not
> Wilson)
> confuses the common meaning of rational, as in
> reasonable, objective, sober with the more specific
> historical rationalism as in Cartesian... I don't
> really see why Hume should be considered
> anti-rational
> in the first sense.
*Well, I don't know where the confusion is. Of course,
Hume was a rational thinker, but he was not a
rationalist. He was extremely skeptical about the
claims of reason to understand anything unaided by the
senses. (His discussion of causality is a case in
point.) And even when aided by the senses, it doesn't
seem that reason can understand the things in
themselves. Kant, too, can be interpreted as more of a
skeptic than a rationalist. Both thinkers were
compared to the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali, who
pre-dates them by almost a thousand years, in that
they criticize the grandiose claims of reason without
rejecting it completely.
> > Another example, one of the most common
> > misconceptions, is that the Enlightenment was
> about
> > atheism, and drove an irreversible wedge between
> > science and reason on one hand and religion on the
> > other. In fact, none of the major Enlightenment
> > thinkers were atheists.
>
> David Hume wasn't a major enlightment thinker? Or
> wasn't he an atheist?
*Robert Paul will be able to answer this, but I don't
think that Hume ever made overtly atheistic
statements. He became known as an atheist after he
died and mostly on the basis of (a reading of) his
Dialogues.
O.K.
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