“Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [Dare to think!] “Have courage to use your own reason!”- that is the motto of enlightenment. ”
– Immanuel Kant
"We can start with "reason." Pinker is an advocate of reason. As the subtitle announces, the book presents "the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress." Pinker frequently refers to the Enlightenment as the "Age of Reason."
But throughout the book reason is treated as an unproblematic given, as if we all know what it is and are happy to sign up to Pinker's version of it. Alas, reason is a notoriously slippery notion. Problematizing it and challenging its authority turns out to be one of the signal achievements of the Enlightenment. Pinker seems blissfully unaware of this.
The most cursory sampling of just some of the key figures of the period helps establish the point. If we go back to the beginning of the scientific revolution - which Pinker routinely conflates with the Enlightenment - we find the seminal figure Francis Bacon observing that "the human intellect left to its own course is not to be trusted." Following in his wake, leading experimentalists of the seventeenth century explicitly distinguished what they were doing from rational speculation, which they regarded as the primary source of error in the natural sciences.
In the next century, David Hume, prominent in the Scottish Enlightenment, famously observed that "reason alone can never produce any action ... Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." And the most celebrated work of Immanuel Kant, whom Pinker rightly regards as emblematic of the Enlightenment, is the Critique of Pure Reason. The clue is in the title."
Like I was getting at on the "reason is non-negotiable" post ... critique ... Kant's three great critiques ... (the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Critique of Judgment), Marx engaged in critique (not abstract theorising over some ahistorical 'Reason,' 'Man,' 'History,' 'Nature') ... the critique of social forms, the 'critique of political economy' ... to make the world, and reason, more reasonable .. and that's miles away certain kinds of rationalism ... "reason has always existed, but not always in rational form." (Cameron wrote a book in the early seventies comparing Edmund Burke and Rousseau, who are a whole lot closer on this than many would think - for my part, I draw attention to Marx's organic metaphors and his distancing from a priori principles of rationality and truth).
Also worth a read is John Gray
“To think of this book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious work is to reassure liberals that they are on ‘the right side of history’”.
I was hinting at this with reference to Rousseau as in and against the Enlightenment, and to Marx's insistence that reason take rational form (in relation to specific social formations and relations - establishing the social conditions of 'rational freedom.' (Not that John Gray would agree with where I was taking this.)
"A lifelong admirer of Voltaire, Nietzsche was a critic of the Enlightenment because he belonged in it. Far from being an enemy of humanism, he promoted humanism in the most radical form. In future, humankind would fashion its values and shape its destiny by its own unfettered will. True, he conferred this privilege only on a select few.
He recognised no principle of human equality. But where does concern with equality come from? Not from science, which can be used to promote many values. As Nietzsche never tired of pointing out, the ideal of equality is an inheritance from Judaism and Christianity. His hatred of equality is one reason he was such a vehement atheist."
OK, that may be provocative. I managed to support equality very well indeed in the many years I was an atheist ... I just wondered where that commitment came from. And realized it didn't come from politics and convention, something 'made-up' and just as easily unmade-up. What is the source of meaning and morality? Nature, it was put to me yesterday. That's problematical indeed for many reasons. Can we confer that privilege of 'taking morality into our own hands' on each and all, and not just the select few? Why would we want to? Justice, as sophist Thrasymachus put it, is the interest of the strongest. Human beings live within asymmetrical social relations, in which the strong predate on the weak, the rich on the poor. I want to see an end to those relations, but the egalitarian commitment that would make the world of will something more than the rule of the strong comes from somewhere else. (We can look at sympathy with Thomas Reid, Hume, Smith, Hutcheson, I just look at the innate moral grammar and refer to the moral law engraved on the human heart, as Rousseau put it, and St Paul's words in Romans) (for reasons I'm developing in work to come. I've noticed a tendency to a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism in the contemporary neo-Aristotelian turn - it doesn't do justice to Aristotle's own view. Work to come). As for Nietzsche:
"The biblical prohibition 'thou shalt not kill' is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents: 'thou shalt not procreate'. Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no 'equal rights', between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter - or the whole will perish. - Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted - that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality!"
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
But bear in mind, too ... that the Enlightenment is still underway ..
Don’t listen to the gloom-sayers. The world has improved by every measure of human flourishing over the past two centuries, and the progress continues, writes Steven Pinker.
Are we defending the Enlightenment as an already accomplished fact? Or demanding its realization as an uncompleted project? What forces stood in the way of such realization? Are we prepared to be as radical and as bold in our thinking as the Enlightenment thinkers were (read on them, and how they challenged constituted power and authority - and allied with its new forms, as Rousseau was quick to point out - and ask whether we are prepared to do the same, or cling on to what we have). I take Marx to be someone working critically in that Enlightenment tradition, examining the social forms that stood in the way of the true realization of the rational, and truly human, society:
"A state which is not the realization of rational freedom," Marx wrote, "is a bad state." Which implies that there is such a thing as the "good state" defined in terms of the embodiment of "rational freedom." The realized society of realized human beings - the 'truly human society.' I'm all in favour. Which begs the question of the precise social forms.
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form. Hence the critic can take his cue from every existing form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from this ideal and final goal implicit in the actual forms of existing reality he can deduce a true reality. Now as far as real life is concerned, it is precisely the political state which contains the postulates of reason in all its modern forms, even where it has not been the conscious repository of socialist requirements. But it does not stop there. It consistently assumes that reason has been realized and just as consistently it becomes embroiled at every point in a conflict between its ideal vocation and its actually existing premises."
Marx, Early Writings, Letters 1975
What rational, social, form could the realization of Reason take? The vision of the immanent society contained as potential, but repressed within, existing social relations - hence Marx engaged in the 'critique' of existing reality rather than wrote theories of the world as an external objective datum.
I’ll put a good word in for my old Director of Studies, Jules Townshend, and the way he located Marx in the Enlightenment tradition.
"how valuable is the attempt to maintain a theoretical and practical fidelity with Marx? Should not Marx be viewed as a major pioneer within the socialist tradition, rather than its prophet? Is it not better to follow the example, rather than the letter, of Marx? As a child of the Enlightenment he had an intense passion for freedom and knowledge in equal measure. He pursued knowledge in the name of freedom. This involved the destruction of any form of mystifying consciousness that sustained humanity's self-oppression, and the development of ideas that would be of practical use to the struggles of the oppressed and exploited. He would not have enjoyed the prospect of future generations looking to him not for inspiration, but for legitimation. Marx and the movement he created offer all those struggling for freedom and equality a treasure house of practical and theoretical wisdom - negative as well as positive. This movement is a constant reminder that the theory and practice of human freedom are always unfinished business. As long as capitalism remains in business, Marxism as a movement and doctrine, in whatever form, is likely to remain obstinately relevant."
Jules Townshend, The Politics of Marxism 1996 ch 15
I was with Jules when his book was published - he was right then and he is right now. I just developed an interest in the bit that was left over from reason, the 'anarchic excess,' the 'surplus', the core that evaded enclosure by a totalizing Reason/human self-legislation/self-creation (avoiding a social monism), the bits that Wittgenstein was silent on, Kant's 'scandal of reason' in noting that the mind raises questions of meaning that it cannot, itself, answer rationally. Rousseau was the first to get wind of this, and broke with the philosophes on this point. He objected to the prevailing materialism and sophism as the 'philosophy of the comfortable.' And Rousseau, too, to his eternal credit, saw that truth and goodness - the Reason that has always existed - could not just be given, passively, but had to be willed, actively, if the democratic revolution was to be completed. I'll put the reference in a comment below, David Lay Williams on Rousseau as the greatest of the modern Platonists, giving us transcendent norms in the democratic age. Are the individuals composing the demos capable of living up to those norms? They'll have to. In a democracy, the character of the people matters a great deal indeed.
Think long and hard on this article on secularism and the creation of the modern sovereign individual, and ponder whether any kind, and what kind, of supra-individual body or institution or authority or collective purpose or common good or public policy or government can be considered legitimate in face of the free subjective choice of the sovereign individual (or put another way, think what kind of public life or common action is possible on the basis of the sovereign individual and individual liberty - think Milton Friedman's 'free to choose' market economy, and all the external constraint of all that the liberty of each entails ...)
"The Virginians’ goals were in a real sense the opposite of Luther’s. They thought they were protecting the nation by separating politics from religion, protecting political society from the poison of religious passions. From a theological perspective, their secularism was a heresy. It diminished the role of the established churches. It separated religion from the world and made it private, and this privatizing imperative of secularism is one of its great victories, albeit an incomplete one. The devout tend to conceive of God or Jesus or Allah or the Quran or the Bible as incomparable, unique authorities. They interpret the secular obligation to render religion a private matter as the impious or heretical telling them that some of their sacred duties are inherently illegitimate."
"For Enlightenment thinkers, the authority of science was such that these findings in physics and geology carried direct political consequences. If physics made the cosmos, and geology the Earth, that left men to make political society."
No law, Jefferson wrote, was ‘more important, none more legitimate’ than one to provide secular arts and sciences education for the people at large. It would, he wrote, make them effective ‘guardians of their own liberty’.
"American secularism has experienced both clear victories and stark defeats. The Anglo-Protestant heresy of making all members of the political community into Luther’s sovereign individuals has become something of an American orthodoxy. Who is more consistently certain that the sanctity of their conscience has vouchsafed God-given rights, whatever they decide those rights might be, than Americans? However, American secularists have generally failed at building institutions that rival the special breadth and depth of religion’s involvement in people’s lives."
"Finally, it is important to emphasise that the varieties of the secular are not all equal. Yes, secularism emerged out of Protestant theology, and philosophy transformed it from a heresy into a tenet of modern politics. But to its 18th-century proponents, it was at root a political project. A secular society, they were certain, would be a more enlightened, peaceful and just society. American secularism has not fulfilled those aspects of its promise. It never even secularised American political life. Whether it was a mistake in principle, or the problem is that secularists did not go far enough, is open to debate, but it is worth remembering that American secularism was always meant to be a means, not an end."
Me? Rousseau broke with the philosophes on account of the determinism and sophism he identified in their materialism. Kant called Rousseau the "Newton of the moral world." Hume praised his genius too. Remarkable psychological insights, seeing us as reasoning, feeling, intuiting beings. Rousseau a mere philosopher of feeling, some say - 'a vague morality of the heart' (said Diderot, who also said that Rousseau was such a difficult man that he could have had him believing in devils .. OK, the man was no angel). Some of these defences of the (liberal - free trade, free speech - Enlightenment see him as a precursor of fascism, complete rot, Rousseau saw the limitations of the liberal reading from within the Enlightenment, and pulled clear of abstract individualism and arid rationalism - good on him too, and his "sublime science of simple souls," the way he saw humans as expanding their being through participation in something greater, Society (Social Contract), Nature (reveries), God (Savoyard Vicar). 'Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.' Some read this as Rousseau as a libertarian arguing against all chains. Not so. He was looking, through the principle of self-assumed obligation, to establish the conditions of legitimate constraint so that the freedom of each individual would be conditional upon and coexistent with the freedom of all individuals. (Think Kant's community of co-legislators or Marx's communism - the kind of enlightenment we are still in search of).
And Rousseau affirmed transcendent standards as against the conventionalism and sophism of the materialists. (Which came from Hobbes, and is alive and well today). Here is David Lay Williams, Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment, Rousseau as logical, a man for whom law was sacred, who saw that the good could not just be given but had to be willed. Any why any Enlightenment short of this would be hollow and prone to rebound on itself. Don't be surprised if an enlightenment constructed on such narrow and brittle terms - cut loose from emotional, ethical, psychic and democratic content - will come to turn back on itself and deliver us to the tyranny and violence of abstraction.
Pinker's "Reason is Non-Negotiable" article is worth reading. I try to develop some of the things here (particularly the idea of a 'science of man') in a direction other than Pinker.
‘The need for a “science of man” was a theme that tied together Enlightenment thinkers who disagreed about much else, including Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, Kant, Nicolas de Condorcet, Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste d’Alembert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Giambattista Vico. Their belief that there was such a thing as universal human nature, and that it could be studied scientifically, made them precocious practitioners of sciences that would be named only centuries later.’
‘This brings us to another Enlightenment ideal, peace… In Perpetual Peace, Kant laid out measures that would discourage leaders from dragging their countries into war. Together with international commerce, he recommended representative republics (what we would call democracies), mutual transparency, norms against conquest and internal interference, freedom of travel and immigration and a federation of states that would adjudicate disputes between them.'
As Kant put it in 'What is Enlightenment?' - have the courage to use your own understanding ... ‘If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you’re committed to progress, you can’t very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn’t.’
OK, some have issues with Pinker and what he says against humanist scholars of leftist persuasion. I'll happily defend critical theory, the Frankfurt School, Bauman et al. The greatest threat to science comes not from these sources, and those interested in the 'dialectic of enlightenment' (such as I) but from a right allied to money within prevailing power relations. So I'll take the good bits beyond any controversies concerning the figure of Pinker.
I've written loads on Kant and the rational community of co-legislators over the years, I cut my philosophical teeth on him, and he still knocks spots off much that passes for philosophy today. As for this 'science of man' - Aristotle!! Aristotle's Politics and Ethics are premised on this very thing.
I’d put Marx in this tradition, - the Aristotle of the nineteenth century, wrote Terry Eagleton in After Theory (2004) - involved in a search for the social forms which enable us not only to have the courage to dare to know – 'sapere aude,' Kant’s 'motto of Enlightenment' – but supporting that nerve and nous with the creation of the social forms and practices of the common life – thereby putting character formation (social identity) and social formation together. Now this begs some questions about international commerce and prosperity, capital as what Marx called 'the universal mode of production.'
There are other and better ways of defending reason and advancing enlightenment than Pinker’s way. Go down this route, and we become shameless apologists for a status quo that is far from being rational and enlightened. And not just apologists, but engaged in a reactionary defence of an enlightened modernity that is imploding within, for want of having the courage to keep thinking beyond ossified institutions and false fixities (it ain't really the 'end of history' with the liberal market, free trade, capitalist insitutions). I go back to Rousseau, who saw the fractures and tensions from the inside, and split with the philosophes on this, suspecting the emergence of a new elite - with Marx, I go for the democratisation of power, politics and philosophy (Rousseau's seemingly paradoxical notion of "the general will" - surely the will can only be particular - grasps that truth cannot just be given but must be willed, must be affective, must be known and lived).
Adorno and Horkheimer get one mention in Pinker's book, among a list of enemies of the Enlightenment. That must apply to me, too, then ... although I know Kant like the back of my hand, and know all about how he insisted on showing the limitations of reason in order to show what reason could do. Kant also discovered the scandal of reason, that the mind raises questions of meaning that it cannot itself answer. This notion of reason and being rational is ... a lot more complicated than certain rationalists think. From the article: "Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club." Kant's motto of enlightenment was have the courage to use your understanding. These defences of the enlightenment are uncritical. And I'll repeat my old DOS's view that Marx, with his critical approach, was a man of the enlightenment. If people want to know why modernity is misfiring, they need to cease their apologetics and stop peddling what Terry Eagleton called an eighteenth century materialism (whilst pointing out that the present peddlers are not remotely in the same class as the likes of Diderot).
"Does the demonization of science in the liberal arts matter?" From someone who shows no understanding of what certain folk in the liberal arts are saying on this. Pinker complains about distortion and demonization of science, and yet does precisely that in relation to others' work here. Let's say he paints with a very broad, and shallow, brush. As calls for cooperation between science and the humanities go, this is grim, mere polemic - and there is such a thing as 'scientism,' however much Pinker seeks to cast doubt on it. This merely contributes to the very problem that needs to be overcome. Frankly, an attempt to monetize, and entrench, the division in understanding, not overcome it. Science and scientific research is a whole lot more than data. Cheap shots against Marx and Marxism too - should we write something on the embeddedness of the institution of science in the prevailing social order, and thereby be accused of being anti-science? "What would happen over the long run if a standard college curriculum devoted less attention to the writings of Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon and more to quantitative analyses of political violence?" Less attention? The amazing thing is, in the middle of a long crisis in the capital system, we are still debating long defunct economic theorists and theorists, even Henry George and his land tax, for crying out loud, but mention Marx, and people run to the hills shouting "authoritarianism." (and Marx did propose a land tax, in the context of a number of other measures and changes, useless in itself, mere pretend radicalism for those wishing to evade the difficult questions of politics). "The hobbling of research is not just a symptom of bureaucratic mission creep. It is actually rationalized by many bioethicists. These theoreticians think up reasons that informed and consenting adults should be forbidden to take part in treatments that help them and others while harming no one. They use nebulous rubrics like "dignity," "sacredness," and "social justice." They try to sow panic about advances in biomedical research with far-fetched analogies to nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like Brave New World and Gattaca, and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, and warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs." Nebulous? "Low standards of reasoning." I know Kant like the back of my hand. Pinker, you ain't no Kant. Drivel. Don't swallow any of this, it's bad for the health. I'll just do the polemic, because that's all it is worth - another installment in the 'men as gods' delusion. "Ultimately the greatest payoff of instilling an appreciation of science is for everyone to think more scientifically. Cognitive psychologists have shown that humans are vulnerable to crippling biases and fallacies." For those who like their philosophy tinged with irony. Not a fan of Foucault or the pomos or many of those who Pinker criticises here, by the way, but Pinker simplifies hugely. And for the record, I agree very much with Pinker when he says: "The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness." I spent the 1990s at war with that fashionable nonsense, arguing that very same thing, and very much sided with Sokal and Bricmont in the science wars.
I've just been reading Paul Mason's "Books to Understand the Left." (I doubt Pinker would approve, but remember that when asked why he concocted his "fashionable nonsense" hoax, Alan Sokal declared himself a man of the left who failed to see how Derrida, Lacan et al advanced the cause of justice, equality etc, in the way that truth, reason and knowledge did - I very much agree). But here is what Mason wrote last week:
"One of the critical factor's in the British Left's bounceback was that it never fully accepted postmodernism. Instead it had maintained a commitment to philosophical materialism: that a world exists beyond our senses; that it can be changed; and that human beings have agency."
Praise be! As one who dug in during that grim period of political reaction and intellectual mindrot, I feel entitled to pat myself on the back. And carry on pursuing 'rational freedom' way beyond the limited terms (apologetics for existing institutions) of Pinker. Pay more attention to Marx, Pinker, oh and Kant's critiques for that matter, and read Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" It is classes above the fantasies of 'scientism' that, in the service of capital, are sending this world to Hades.
On the plus side - reason, truth, science as a reality-check, fact, knowledge - all central to the Enlightenment. I remember referring to truth in the 1990s, and was immediately challenged. Apparently, the notion has to be spelled "Truth." OK ... let's relate it to prevailing institutions and relations. But not forget that there is such a thing as truth (moral truth, too, I'd add). Somewhere, via particular social forms, the connection between reason and freedom was severed (and the worlds of fact and value). Reconnection is the challenge. And understanding where that separation comes from is precisely what the people Pinker attacks try to do (eg Adorno and Horkheimer, "The Dialectic of Enlightenment." This stuff can't just be dismissed as 'demonizing' science, but I've been accused of being anti-technology myself often enough. Well, I'll plead guilty, in the same way that Lewis Mumford was guilty (who advocated a democratic technics against the authoritarian technics of the Megamachine, and for whom 'technics' embraced ethics and culture, soft technology as well as hard. Seems reasonable to me.)
My take on Rousseau