The Renaissance and
Rationality:
The Status of the Enlightenment Today
by Loren Goldner
"In the movement from Boehme to Bacon, there is a great step forward in precision and an equally great step backward in sensuousness".
G.F.W. Hegel
History of Philosophy
Few people in the Western left today are very enthusiastic about
defending the Enlightenment per se. And with good reason: its social legacy
is in a shambles. In the 1945-1975 postwar expansion East, West, South and
North, the "enlightened planner" (whatever the sordid reality) had cachet.
Today, from Novossibirsk and Chernobyl to the dynamited high rise towers
of St. Louis, by way of the giganticism of the semi-abandoned steel plants
and superhighways built with Western and Soviet aid for now-forgotten Third
World dictators, the planet is littered with the ruins of the bureaucratic
appropriation of the Enlightenment project. A vigorous defense of the Enlightenment,
as put forward by figures such as Habermas and his followers, might seem
a breath of fresh air in the contemporary climate of post-modernism and "identity
politics", whose hostility to the Enlightenment, drawing on Nietzsche and
Heidegger (often without knowing it) the Habermasians rightly decry. To seriously
defend the Enlightenment today means to draw on a historical culture which
is totally unfashionable, suspiciously "white male", in the trendy academic
radicalism of today. But such defenses also shows signs of not realizing
how serious the problem is. One cannot today defend the Enlightenment (and
we agree that a defense is necessary) with the ideas of the Enlightenment
alone. However unpalatable it may be to do so in the contemporary climate,
where the Enlightenment project is everywhere under attack by Nietzscheans,
"cultural studies" ideologues, Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists,
Foucaultians, Afrocentrists and (most) ecologists, it is necessary to discuss
the limits of the Enlightenment in order to defend it, and to go beyond it.
One of the more serious errors today, of those on the left who wish
to critically defend the Enlightenment, is their hurry to draw a line of
direct continuity from the Enlightenment to Marx.
The Enlightenment, following the French revolution, has always had its
critics, such as Burke, de Maistre, Chamberlain and other figures of te
19th century counter- revolution. . But there was another critique of the
Enlightenment afoot in Europe well before the French Revolution, the German
Sturm und Drang movement, which included figures of no less stature than
Herder and Goethe, and which prepared the way for another critique of the
Enlightenment, romanticism. It is true that there are few romantics today,
and consequently few post-modernist nihilists waste any breath attacking
"the dialectic of romanticism". The proto-romantic Sturm und Drang, and the
romantic movement throughout Europe after 1800, added many elements to the
revolutionary tradition. Winckelmann's study of Greek art founded a Hellenophilism
which was foreign to the Latin-Roman contours of the Enlightenment in France,
and pointed toward a vision of community in the polis which inspired Hoelderlin
(hardly an "Enlightenment" figure) and the early Hegel, in pointed rejection
of the statism of most of the French Aufklärer. Out of the work of Herder
(and the lesser-known Vico) came an understanding foreign to the Enlightenment
that social institutions do not derive from abstract principles but are the
factum, the product of history. Marx studied the work of the conservative
German historical school of law, in order to appropriate elements of its
organicist critique of the abstraction of the Enlightenment for the revolutionary
movement. The romantic philosophers Schelling and Fichte developed an idea
that also exists nowhere in the Enlightenment, except as adumbrated (at its
end) by Kant: that human activity constitutes reality through its praxis.
G.F.W. Hegel, who critiqued both the limits of Enlightenment and of romanticism,
pulled all these elements into a philosophy of history that was, as Herzen
said, the "algebra" of revolution. There would have been no "Theses on Feuerbach"
without these figures, and hence no Marx as we know him today. What did the
"Theses on Feuerbach" say? They said "all previous materialisms, including
Feuerbach's, do not understand activity as objective". Marx here is explicitly
referring to Enlightenment materialists such as Hobbes, Mersenne, and Holbach,
emphasizing the importance of the "active side developed by idealism", by
which he means Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, none of whom can be considered
"Enlightenment" thinkers, even if they are also not "anti-Enlightenment"
, in the same way as figures such as Maistre, for whom the Enlightenment
and then the French Revolution were quite simply the eruption of the satanic
in history.
Another major distinction between the Enlightenment and Marx is the
attitude toward religion. This is particularly important since most Marxists
have tended to think that Marx's view is basically identical with that of
Voltaire: religion is "wrong", "false", l'infâme. But Marx, coming after
50 years of the rich philosophical discussion of religion in German idealism
and then in his materialist predecessor Feuerbach, saw religion "as the heart
of a heartless world, the spirit of a world without spirit". Religion for
Marx was a prime case of what he called alienation, whereby human beings
invert dreams of a better life into an other-worldly form. But a Voltairean
would never have said, as Marx did, that "you cannot abolish religion without
realizing it". Simple Enlightenment atheism never asserted there was anything
to "realize", because such a view accords its (alienated) truth to religion.
History vs. abstract principles, polis community vs. statism, the alienated
human truth of religion vs. 18th-century atheism, , constitution of the world
by activity vs. a mere contemplative vision of reality as "out there": all
these key concepts were developed not by the Enlightenment but by Sturm and
Drang, and then romanticism and idealism, they were all fundamental for
Marx. A straight line from the Enlightenment to socialism which does not
exist, makes both an easier target for the post-modernists as a "master
narrative" of "domination", resting on schoolboy notions of "materialism"
which derive from Newton's atomism.This telescoping of Enlightenment and socialism
is actually (and usually quite unintentionally) reminiscent of Stalinism,
which did not have much use for the post-Enlightenment (not to mention pre-Enlightenment)
sources of Marx (as sketched above)either.1
Enlightenment political thought moves, at its "commanding heights",
from Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Kant. But it is exactly here that
the problems arise. The Enlightenment is not just, not even primarily, a
body of thought; it is that, but it is still more a social project and a
social practice that was, in the majority of cases, taken up and implemented
by state civil servants. This was not the case in England, where Enlightenment
thought of the 17th and 18th century, the work of Bacon, Newton, Hobbes,
Locke, Hooke, Boyle, Smith, Gibbon, Hume and Paine unfolded in a new civil
society which had successfully freed itself from absolutism by the revolutions
of 1640 and 1688. Nor was this the case in America, where Jefferson, Franklin,
Paine and Madison were just as much at the cutting edge, freeing America
from colonial domination. But the Enlightenment on the continent, to a great
extent as ideology and above all as the practice of Enlightened absolutism,
was statist through and through, from the philosophes and their dreams of
benign Asian despots, to the Jacobins, to the Prussian reformers of 1808.
In France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian states, Prussia, Sweden, Austria
and Russia, (and in the Iberian and French colonies in the New World), the
Enlightenment was the theory and practice of civil servants working for absolutist
states. Voltaire at the Prussian court of Frederick II or Diderot at the
Russian court of Catherine the Great are only the most memorable instances
of the intertwining of the philosophes and the Enlightened absolutisms of
their time. Even Napoleon, in a warped way, was spreading Enlightened statist
reform through his conquest of Europe.
It may well be the case that the best of the thought of Voltaire and
Diderot was "in contradiction" with their idea of influencing powerful monarchs
to do the right thing.To point out the realities of their statism is not
to fall into a Foucaultian view of the Enlightenment as about nothing but
"power", nor is it to echo a Frankfurt School view of the Enlightenment as
mere "domination". One is quite right to reject these Nietzschean and Weberian
views of rationality. The problem of many contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment
is their failure to see that the bedrock foundation, what the Enlightenment
itself accepted as its undisputed point of departure and its model of the
power of rational thought was Newton's physics. But Newton's physics (which
were, in their time, undoubtedly revolutionary) were not merely about physics,
or nature: they stood for 150 years, and in reality for 300 years, as the
very model of what "science" was and ought to be. For most figures of the
Enlightenment (important exceptions are Diderot and Rousseau) the rigor and
exactness of mathematical physics stood as a model for all realms of human
endeavour, including the psyche and the arts. Figures such as Condillac and
Holbach spent decades trying to work out a psychology (as Hobbes had earlier
done with politics) based on the central Newtonian concept of "force", and
Condorcet dreamed of a "social mathematics". LaMettrie went from "la nature
machine" to "l'homme machine", and this was generalized by LaPlace and LaGrange
into "l'univers machine". And, lest one get the impression that these were
mainly late Enlightenment aberrations, one should recall the great impact
of Euclid and Galileo on Hobbes, Voltaire's pamphleteering for Newton, or
finally Kant's statement, just about the time that Gauss was realizing otherwise,
that Euclidean space was the only possible space.
These strong metaphors, and the program they inspired, generalized
from a powerful breakthrough in the dynamics of physical bodies in the new
abstract space and time, to the totality of science and culture, died out
very recently. Only a generation ago psychological behaviourism, which has
to be seen as a very degenerate heir of the late Enlightenment of Condillac,
LaMettrie and Holbach, still got a serious hearing in Anglo-American universities,
and Talcott Parsons in the 1940's boasted that he was "close to splitting
the sociological atom".
Thus, while completely supporting their desire to do battle with the
post-modernists, one must ask today's Aufklärer: what are you going to do
with the Enlightenment today? What conceivable intellectual, political and
social program is possible today built on the Enlightenment alone? (This
is a very separate question from its defense against those who deny its once-radical
edge.)
Newton's physics were, once again, not merely a physics, (the latter
undoubtedly being of great power, a guiding research program for over 200
years), they were little less than an ontology, and they were unquestioned
by the Enlightenment. Few contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment have
much to say about Newton's alchemy, astrology, Biblical commentary, history
(attempting to confirm the truth of Old Testament chronology), anti-Trinitarian
theology or search for the Egyptian cubit, a body of work which Newton himself
placed on an equal footing with his physics and of which, for him, his physics
was only a part. (Interestingly, and revealingly, the Frankfurt School and
the Foucaultian critics of the Enlightenment have little to say about them
either.) Many of these pursuits were already becoming unfashionable in Newton's
own time, and Voltaire's popularization of Newton on the continent after
1730 already passed them over in total silence. But the discovery of this
Newton is already enough to show that he was not exactly, or certainly not
only, an "Enlightenment" thinker. It is quite right to date the Enlightenment
not from the 18th century French philosophes but from 17th century English
figures such as Bacon. But in rightly situating the question in the 17th
century, the typical defender of the Enlightenment also steps into the quagmire
in which received ideas about the Enlightenment and its origins disappear.
Newtonian science, and hence the Enlightenment, defeated the kind
of church-sponsored obscurantism represented by the trial of Galileo, or
the earlier trial and execution of Giordano Bruno. But it also defeated
what I would call Renaissance- Reformation cosmobiology, as the latter is
associated with names such as Nicholas of Cusa, Bruno , Paracelsus, John
Dee, Robert Fludd, Boehme and above all Kepler. Elements of it persist as
late as Leibniz, co-inventor with Newton of the calculus, and who already
polemicized against Newton's mechanism. Newton, as sketched above, still
had much of the Renaissance magus about him. This cosmobiological world view
further found its cultural expression in figures such as Dürer, the Brueghels,
Bosch, Shakespeare and Rabelais, just as later Pope and Dryden attempted
to create a literature in keeping with Newtonian science. In this transition,
an empty , atomistic space and time, based on an infinity understood as mere
repetition (the infinitesmal) deflated and expelled a universe brimming with
life, in which, further, human imagination was central. One need only think
of Paracelsus, the peripatetic alchemist, astrologer, chemist, herbalist
, tireless researcher and medical practicioner who called the human imagination
"the star in man" (astrum in homine) and who placed it higher than the mere
stars which preoccupied astronomers. But no figure is more exemplary than
Kepler, who looked for the Platonic solids in the order of the solar system
and who attempted to demonstrate that the distance between the planets was
in accordance with the well-tempered tuning of the "music of the spheres".
This was the world view-- the cosmology-- which was deflated and replaced
by Newton's colorless, tasteless, odorless space and time, and the latter
deflation reached into every domain of culture for 300 years. And this cosmobiological
world view was an indisputable precursor of Marx's "sensuous transformative
praxis" (sinnliche unwälzende Tätigkeit) and hence of modern socialism. By
its notion of human participation of the constitutition of the world (whereby
it smacked of heresy for the Church), it was closer to Marx than any of the
intervening Enlightenment views.
Until quite recently, it was customary to acknowledge many of these
figures, and Paracelsus and Kepler in particular, as pioneers who contributed
to the transition "from alchemy to chemistry", "from astrology to astronomy".
But the Enlightenment vision of their advance was completely linear, as if
nothing of importance had been lost. But already a figure of the stature
of Leibniz, who himself made a major contribution to the new science, argued
in his polemics against Newton's publicist Clarke that something had been
lost: life, not as the random result of a billiard ball universe, but as
a phenomenon central to the meaning of the universe, as it had been for Paracelsus
and Kepler.
The Enlightenment did not shed light on this transition; on the contrary,
it was mainly totally oblivious to it, when it was not actively obscuring
it. The Enlightenment created the myth of the "dark ages" of religion between
Greco-Roman antiquity and the 17th century (one need only think, by contrast,
of the brilliant culture, including the scientific culture, of Islam). It
saw a monolithic Christianity completely hostile to science and thereby fashioned
the modern (and modernist) myth that history prior to Newtonian science was
strictly a battle between "religion" and "materialist atheism", the latter
being exactly the kind of materialism which Marx rejected in the "Theses
on Feuerbach". (This is not to suggest that Marx was not an atheist but merely
to insist on the distinction, developed earlier, between his critique of religion
and Voltaire's.)
In reality, while most of the figures of Renaissance-Reformation cosmobiology
were at least nominally Christian believers of one kind or another (although
in the case of Bruno, one wonders) their significance is precisely that they
represented a "third stream", an alternative to both the dominant Aristotelian
scholasticism propogated by the Church and to the atomistic materialism that
congealed in the Enlightenment. This "third stream" was also often combatted,
along with atheist materialism, by the Church as the highest heresy.2 And
this "third stream" and its significance were essentially hidden for three
centuries by the Manichean portrait of the past developed by the Enlightenment
and taken over in the ideology of modernity.
This "third stream", of which again Kepler is the culminating figure,
was hardly, as Enlightenment ideology portrayed it by assimilating it to
"religion", hostile to science or to scientific research. Indeed, Kepler's
work provided one part of the key to Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
The "third stream" was of course characterized by many untenable a priori
views such as the correspondance of the microcosm-man and the macrocosm-universe,
or by Kepler's own search for Platonic form, as in a perfect Platonic circle
in the orbit of the planets. Kepler passed over into modern science by abandoning
that form for the empirically-discovered ellipse, but he got there by looking
for it. The "third stream" had little or nothing to counter the successes
of the Newtonian- atomist program, until the latter had exhausted itself.
Nevertheless, a history of the science since Newton which has attempted to
revive the "third stream", too complex to concern us here, would include
names of the stature of Baader, Schelling, Oersted, Davy, Faraday, Goethe,
W.R. Hamilton, Georg Cantor and Joseph Needham, and the issues they raise
are far from settled.
It is significant that neither the pro-Enlightenment Habermasians or
the anti-Enlightenment deconstructionists and Foucaultians have much use
for Renaissance- Reformation cosmobiology, and the reason is that all of
them tacitly accept the Enlightenment linear view of history and progress
as the sole possible kind of progress, in which the "third stream" disappears
into the "religion" of the "dark ages". There is an unacknowledged agreement
here between opposing sides which makes possible a recasting of the debate.
This largely unspoken agreement accepts the division of the world between
culture and nature, (or Geist and Natur as the Germans would say) and, however
differently various figures may treat the world of consciousness, they
concede the world of nature to the mechanists. Such a division was only
possible after Newton and the ideological suppression of the cosmobiological
"third stream", which, whatever its flaws, presented a unitary vision of consciousness
and nature. The reaction to the implications, for consciousness, of the Enlightenment
program was quick in coming, and many took up Donne's lament of "all coherence
gone". But from Pascal to Rousseau to Hegel (for whom nature was "boring",
the world of repetition) to Nietzsche to Heidegger, all the different formulations
on the impossibility of treating human consciousness on the model of mathematical
physics (which is indeed impossible) took off from the assumption of dead
nature, in which "life" had to appear not as Paracelsus' astrum in homine
or Leibniz's vis vitae but as some "irrational" "vitalistic" force.
Nor should the reader get the impression that Renaissance- Reformation
cosmobiology did not have political implications, as atomism and mechanism
shaped the political thought of the Enlightenment. Its first and major political
implication stems from the fact that it was decidely an ideology of "interregnum",
appearing between the collapse of the medieval Holy Roman Empire and the
consolidation of English capitalism and above all continental absolutism,
both of which eradicated it everywhere. In a meaningful sense, the Renaissance
and Reformation as a whole can be understood as an interregnum phenomena,
but many other currents within them competed with what I call cosmobiology.
These political implications were not as well articulated by its theoreticians
as was the Enlightenment, partly because the concept of the "political" (itself
recognized by Marx as an alienated separation) only autonomized itself later
and partly because these movements, unlike the Enlightenment, were primarily
of the lower classes, and thus were completely defeated, and their history
mainly written by the victors. Their finest hours were the radical wing
of the Reformation (essentially, the Anabaptists and their leader Thomas
Münzer) and the radical wing of the English Revolution, the Levellers, Diggers
and smaller sects. (Gerard Winstanley stands out as a spokesman for this
milieu.) One only fully appreciates Newton's political meaning when one understands
the importance of his tirades against these "enthusiasts", as they were called.
Here it can be seen clearly that the English Enlightenment triumphed not
merely by defeating reactionary Stuart absolutism but also by defeating radical
currents to its left.
When the interregnum was over, ca. 1650, the radical social base of
the "third stream" was socially and politically defeated, and the Enlightenment
could begin, with its two contending models of English constitutional monarchy
and French absolutism, the latter becoming the model for most of the continent.
But left defenders of the Enlightenment, pass over in silence the fact that
the Anglo-French Enlightenment triumphed over a radical as well as a reactionary
rival, and always bore the markings that fact.
Stated briefly, the spirit of Marx's underlying world view is more truly
the direct heir, the "realization" of the sensuousness of figures such as
Shakespeare, the Brueghels and Paracelsus, than of any subsequent phase
of the Anglo-French Enlightenment and its aftermath.
One might well ask what such a critique of the Enlightenment, from
the vantage point of Renaissance-Reformation "cosmobiology" means today,
in political terms.
What it means is this. From the French Revolution until the 1970's,
the dominant currents of the Western left, and the movements it influenced
in the colonial and post- colonial world, were indeed heirs of the Enlightenment.
They were this because, in practice if not always in rhetoric, they inherited
the tasks of completing the bourgeois revolution, tasks for which the Enlightenment,
as the most advanced outlook of that revolution, was eminently suitable.
First Social Democracy, from the 1860's onward, and then Stalinism, from
the 1920's, took over a large part of the Enlightenment attitudes toward
science, the state, technology, heavy industry, rationality, nature, a linear
view of progress, philosophy and religion. That view was at bottom atomistic
and mechanistic, even when dressed up as "dialectical materialism". Their
statist development ideology and strategy was most successful in countries
where no liberal bourgeoisie was strong enough to fight in its own name for
the Enlightenment program against pre-capitalist social relations. Social
Democracy and later Stalinism took over the full weight of Enlightenment
statism of the continental variety. This was not surprising, since they
gained influence mainly in the same backward countries in which Enlightenment
statism had been successful, for essentially the same reasons. With the
virtually universal spread of state bureaucracy for the century up to ca.
1975, whether in liberal democracy, Social Democracy, Stalinism or Third
World nationalism, this Enlightenment ideology was rooted practically in
a vast global stratum of middle-class state civil servants, whatever else
they may have disagreed about. Not accidentally, their theory of history,
when they felt they needed one, was articulated by the state civil servants
par excellence Kant, Fichte and Hegel.
The crisis of the Enlightenment today is the world-wide crisis of that
state civil service stratum, welfare-statist, Stalinist or Third Worldist,
and its inability after the mid- 1970's to continue to develop the productive
forces and to advance their Enlightenment program, something they had done
rather successfully in the previous century, particularly from 1945 to 1975.
The international left is in crisis because it uncritically took over the
Enlightenment, and thereby confused the tasks of the bourgeois revolution
with those of the socialist revolution; the left's claims to fight for
social emancipation got completely entwined with the state bureaucracy and
civil service, which are irreducible obstacles to full social emancipation.
There is nothing more to be done with the Enlightenment, taken by itself,
because there is no more bourgeois revolution to make. There is also nothing
more to be done with the Enlightenment view of nature, derived as it is from
Newton's atomism and mechanism. The Enlightenment grasped in a one-sided
way the impact of the natural environment on man but, lacking the idea of
constitutive practice, has little to say in an era such as our own, so shaped
by the problems of man's impact on the environment. This is not because,
as the post-modernists say, Western science and technology are nothing but
"domination", but because the unique role of humanity in the biosphere,
its "species-being" to use Marx's term, was articulated not by the Enlightenment
but by the "active side developed by idealism" as Marx put it in the "Theses
on Feuerbach". The Enlightenment looked to Nature to underpin its abstract
theories of Natural Man; it did not understand that human history constantly
creates "new natures", and hence new "human natures", by its interraction
with the biosphere.
The Foucaultian and Frankfurt School critics of the Enlightenment live
off the impoverishment of the left by its extended romance with a one-sided
appropriation of the Enlightenment, by the left's century-long confusion
of the completion of the bourgeois revolution by state civil servants with
socialism, and by the worldwide crackup of that project. The pre-Enlightenment,
Renaissance-Reformation cosmobiology which passed through German idealism
into Marx's species-being means even less to them than it does to figures
such as Habermas. Yet the usual critique of them is undermined by the tacit
agreement across the board that "nature is boring", i.e. the realm of mechanism,
as Hegel, articulating the ultimate state civil servant view, cut off from
practice in nature, said. Both sides of this debate still inhabit the separation
of culture and nature, Geist and Natur, which came into existence through
the Enlightenment's deflation of cosmobiology. It is the rehabilitation,
in suitably contemporary form, of the outlook of Paracelsus and Kepler,
not of Voltaire and Newton, which the left requires today for a (necessarily
simultaneous) regeneration of nature, culture and society, out of Blake's
fallen world of Urizen and what he called "single vision and Newton's sleep".
From the Break Their
Haughty Power web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner
