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I have posted a differently detailed version of this for friends on my joculum LiveJournal, but in spite of starting in medias res, this version probably explains more clearly than do previous posts why I follow such disparate concerns even in this journal's fresh attempt at a more coherent approach to my overall arguments. We begin with a reprise of why rehashing the old arguments about the legacy of the Enlightenment only gets us so far, and we begin with a re-reading of the eighteenth century based on a summary by Christopher McIntosh but going off in quite different directions from his:
The Enlightenment adopted egalitarian views about human nature only slowly, after beginning with a sense of hierarchical privilege for the rational elite over the irrational masses. The Counter-Enlightenment stuck with hierarchy and distrusted abstract rationality, being suspicious of the capacity of human reason to comprehend and change the world quite as fully and quickly as the philosophes supposed it could. But even among Enlightenment thinkers, the correlation between the belief in ages of “reason, science, and freedom” versus ages of “credulity, myth, and superstition” does not lead to identical conclusions from country to country—ironically confirming the Counter-Enlightenment’s argument that there is nothing universal about the socially given qualities of human nature. The difference is that the Enlightenment thinkers thought they were fighting over which brand of universal principle was preferable, not noticing the social conditions within which they were devising their arguments, and the Counter-Enlightenment thinkers were absolutizing local preferences, when their logic should have been leading them to relativize those preferences instead. (But then, the Counter-Enlightenment's argument always was that following logic too far just gets you into trouble—and I should emphasize that McIntosh is not putting things quite this bluntly.)
McIntosh’s point, which I have already shamelessly taken off in another direction, is that there is no automatic correlation between epistemological and political views in the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, or even of overall epistemological views. The Counter-Enlightenment’s rejection of the notion of a “universal human nature” led more often than not to “a distrust of reform, a respect for tradition and a deference to authority, even when it was given to cruelty and abuses”—on the grounds that the blind worship of universal principles was even more likely to give rise to even worse cruelties and abuses.
But this is already an odd form of the hermeneutics of suspicion—we hang on to the old, not because it is right, but because it is less destructively wrong than the other incorrect ways of looking at the world. And in this slippery environment, such a figure as Giambattista Vico appears to be an Enlightenment thinker from one perspective and a Counter-Enlightenment one from another. Isaac Newton applies the methods of “rational science” to the search for “a prisca sapientia in which biblical studies and alchemy occupied more of his attention than astronomy and optics.”
What this really means is that the meaning of meaning, or indeed the very means of knowing what was right and wrong, was deeply in contention. Positions that seem to us to lead to one logical conclusion often led to the opposite, and for equally good reason. (There were also many exquisitely erroneous syllogisms, of course...the Counter-Enlightenment didn’t merely defend the divine right of kings and the supremacy of the Pope as convenient fictions to ward off catastrophe, it defended absolutist views absolutely.)
I bring all of this up because we have gone through so many ultimately pointless debates about the legacy of the Enlightenment in recent decades. Of course the belief in universal human nature served as a rationale for colonialists using cannons to bring enlightenment to “lesser breeds without the Law.” Of course both optimism regarding human nature and pessimism regarding it were, and are, used by exploiters to manipulate other human beings for their own selfish purposes. Of course we are able to change the human condition less than the Enlightenment hoped, and more than the Counter-Enlightenment believed.
—But of course there is no “of course” about that last statement. That is what we are fighting over today, and we are fighting over it, too often, with intellectual weapons forged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are ill-fitted to twenty-first century realities. North Atlantic philosophy (James Elkins’ latest attempt to get around that problematic term “Western”) may be a series of footnotes to Plato, but North Atlantic (and global) science is not, and therein lies the intellectual conflicts and muddles we have repeated, like the return of the repressed, ever since the Renaissance. Adding global philosophy to the debate has often only deepened the muddles, although deep muddles may well be better than shallow ones.
We do not need to keep repeating the muddles, even if we are only going to develop new muddles. At least let us confront the evidence, and the question of whether it really is evidence. “Say of what you see in the dark / That it is this, or it is that, but do not use the rotted names,” as Wallace Stevens put it.
What we see in the dark is that as we know well, the human genetic inheritance is not distributed according to “racial” lines since races do not exist, but as we are learning more and more, it is unevenly distributed nonetheless. Some personality quirks do show up more dominantly in some populations than in others, some diseases are more chronic in some populations than in others...and yet the existence of neuroplasticity and the amazing adaptability of human social institutions means that a good many of the variables can be eliminated with the right tinkering.
But what is “the right tinkering”? And what is the right way to redefine what is universal about human nature? We have learned there are pitfalls in the very nature of our language, and most of all in how we frame our arguments. Ideas have consequences, although the consequences are not always what we expect and far too frequently not what we intend, even when we try to correct for probable distortions.
I think it’s worth looking at the various ways that world cultures have solved that problem, even when they didn’t always know how to define the problem and certainly didn’t know the biology behind it.
And to some degree, just mapping the terrain accurately is useful for seeing why we keep hitting the same dead ends, century after century. So I feel impelled to look at whatever segments of it I can endure to study, and see where they fit into this misassembled jigsaw puzzle of human history.
The Enlightenment adopted egalitarian views about human nature only slowly, after beginning with a sense of hierarchical privilege for the rational elite over the irrational masses. The Counter-Enlightenment stuck with hierarchy and distrusted abstract rationality, being suspicious of the capacity of human reason to comprehend and change the world quite as fully and quickly as the philosophes supposed it could. But even among Enlightenment thinkers, the correlation between the belief in ages of “reason, science, and freedom” versus ages of “credulity, myth, and superstition” does not lead to identical conclusions from country to country—ironically confirming the Counter-Enlightenment’s argument that there is nothing universal about the socially given qualities of human nature. The difference is that the Enlightenment thinkers thought they were fighting over which brand of universal principle was preferable, not noticing the social conditions within which they were devising their arguments, and the Counter-Enlightenment thinkers were absolutizing local preferences, when their logic should have been leading them to relativize those preferences instead. (But then, the Counter-Enlightenment's argument always was that following logic too far just gets you into trouble—and I should emphasize that McIntosh is not putting things quite this bluntly.)
McIntosh’s point, which I have already shamelessly taken off in another direction, is that there is no automatic correlation between epistemological and political views in the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, or even of overall epistemological views. The Counter-Enlightenment’s rejection of the notion of a “universal human nature” led more often than not to “a distrust of reform, a respect for tradition and a deference to authority, even when it was given to cruelty and abuses”—on the grounds that the blind worship of universal principles was even more likely to give rise to even worse cruelties and abuses.
But this is already an odd form of the hermeneutics of suspicion—we hang on to the old, not because it is right, but because it is less destructively wrong than the other incorrect ways of looking at the world. And in this slippery environment, such a figure as Giambattista Vico appears to be an Enlightenment thinker from one perspective and a Counter-Enlightenment one from another. Isaac Newton applies the methods of “rational science” to the search for “a prisca sapientia in which biblical studies and alchemy occupied more of his attention than astronomy and optics.”
What this really means is that the meaning of meaning, or indeed the very means of knowing what was right and wrong, was deeply in contention. Positions that seem to us to lead to one logical conclusion often led to the opposite, and for equally good reason. (There were also many exquisitely erroneous syllogisms, of course...the Counter-Enlightenment didn’t merely defend the divine right of kings and the supremacy of the Pope as convenient fictions to ward off catastrophe, it defended absolutist views absolutely.)
I bring all of this up because we have gone through so many ultimately pointless debates about the legacy of the Enlightenment in recent decades. Of course the belief in universal human nature served as a rationale for colonialists using cannons to bring enlightenment to “lesser breeds without the Law.” Of course both optimism regarding human nature and pessimism regarding it were, and are, used by exploiters to manipulate other human beings for their own selfish purposes. Of course we are able to change the human condition less than the Enlightenment hoped, and more than the Counter-Enlightenment believed.
—But of course there is no “of course” about that last statement. That is what we are fighting over today, and we are fighting over it, too often, with intellectual weapons forged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are ill-fitted to twenty-first century realities. North Atlantic philosophy (James Elkins’ latest attempt to get around that problematic term “Western”) may be a series of footnotes to Plato, but North Atlantic (and global) science is not, and therein lies the intellectual conflicts and muddles we have repeated, like the return of the repressed, ever since the Renaissance. Adding global philosophy to the debate has often only deepened the muddles, although deep muddles may well be better than shallow ones.
We do not need to keep repeating the muddles, even if we are only going to develop new muddles. At least let us confront the evidence, and the question of whether it really is evidence. “Say of what you see in the dark / That it is this, or it is that, but do not use the rotted names,” as Wallace Stevens put it.
What we see in the dark is that as we know well, the human genetic inheritance is not distributed according to “racial” lines since races do not exist, but as we are learning more and more, it is unevenly distributed nonetheless. Some personality quirks do show up more dominantly in some populations than in others, some diseases are more chronic in some populations than in others...and yet the existence of neuroplasticity and the amazing adaptability of human social institutions means that a good many of the variables can be eliminated with the right tinkering.
But what is “the right tinkering”? And what is the right way to redefine what is universal about human nature? We have learned there are pitfalls in the very nature of our language, and most of all in how we frame our arguments. Ideas have consequences, although the consequences are not always what we expect and far too frequently not what we intend, even when we try to correct for probable distortions.
I think it’s worth looking at the various ways that world cultures have solved that problem, even when they didn’t always know how to define the problem and certainly didn’t know the biology behind it.
And to some degree, just mapping the terrain accurately is useful for seeing why we keep hitting the same dead ends, century after century. So I feel impelled to look at whatever segments of it I can endure to study, and see where they fit into this misassembled jigsaw puzzle of human history.
