Transcript Enlightenment project

Don’t Panic!
One such reason why the unity and the coherence of the eighteenth-century
culture of Enlightenment sometimes escapes us is that we too often understand it
as primarily an episode in French cultural history. In fact France is from the
standpoint of that culture itself the most backward of the enlightened nations.
The French themselves often avowedly looked to English models, but England in
turn was overshadowed by the achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment. The
greatest figures of all were certainly German: Kant and Mozart. But for
intellectual variety as well as intellectual range not even the Germans can
outmatch David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, Lord Kames
and Lord Monboddo.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 37.
A Three-Stage History
For a prerequisite for understanding the present disordered state of
the imaginary world was to understand its history, a history that had
to be written in three distinct stages. The first stage was that in
which the natural sciences flourished, the second that in which they
suffered catastrophe and the third that in which they were restored
but in a damaged and disordered form.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 3.
MacIntyre’s History of Modern Morality
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3A
Stage 3B
Morality Flourishes
Catastrophe
The Enlightenment
Emotivist Culture
(16/17th centuries)
(c1630-c1850)
(late 19th century to present)
(This part of the story gets
told later on.)
Reformation & Jansenism
(both 16th century)
There is a broad consensus
over inherited moral beliefs.
Scientific Revolution
(16/17th centuries)
Philosophy is part of the
culture of the educated
public.
Political Revolutions
(17th century onwards)
The Enlightenment project is
the attempt by philosophers to
provide rational foundation for
those beliefs.
Key figures:
David Hume (1711-1776)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Moral consensus replaced by
interminable moral
disagreement.
Emotivist culture obliterates
the distinction between
manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations.
Emotivist self lacks criteria for
rational evaluation.
Dominated by three characters:
Manager
Therapist
Aesthete
What is the Enlightenment project?
Short answer: the attempt to provide a rational justification for morality.
“At the same time as they agree largely on the character of morality, they agree also
upon what a rational justification of morality would have to be. Its key premises
would characterize some feature or features of human nature; and the rules of
morality would then be explained and justified as being those rules which a being
possessing just such a human nature could be expected to accept.”
Notice the universality of the project: to successfully complete the project would mean providing
a justification of morality the validity of which any rational person should be able to recognize.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 51-52.
Key Figures of the Enlightenment Project
1.Hume:
Morality is based on the passions.
2.Kant:
Morality is based on reason.
3.Kierkegaard: Morality is based on choice.
Hume on reason
It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the
scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason for me to choose my total
ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to
me. It is as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser
good to my greater, and to have a more ardent affection for the former than the
latter.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book II. Part iii. Section 3. (Spelling modernized.)
Kant and Morality
Kant had absolutely no doubt in the reality and authority of morality:
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and
awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the
starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I
seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond
my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately
with my existence.”
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 133.
Kant vs. Hume
“… is it not thought to be of the utmost necessity to work out for once a pure moral
philosophy, completely cleansed of everything that may be only empirical and that
belongs to anthropology? For, that there must be such a philosophy is clear of itself
from the common idea of duty and of moral laws. Everyone must grant that a law, if
it is to hold morally, that is, as a ground of an obligation, must carry with it absolute
necessity; that, for example, the command “thou shalt not lie” does not hold only for
human beings, as if other rational beings did not have to heed it, and so with all
other moral laws properly so called; that, therefore, the ground of obligation here
must not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the circumstances of the
world in which he is placed, but a priori simply in concepts of pure reason; and that
any other precept, which is based on principles of mere experience – even if it is
universal in a certain respect – insofar as it rests in the least part on empirical
grounds, perhaps only in terms of a motive, can indeed be called a practical rule but
never a moral law.”
Immanuel Kant, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 133.
Kierkegaard and the End of the Enlightenment Project
The influence of negative arguments is equally clear in both Kant and
Kierkegaard. Just as Hume seeks to found morality on the passions
because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on
reason, so Kant founds it on reason because his arguments have
excluded the possibility of founding it on the passions, and
Kierkegaard on criterionless fundamental choice because of what he
takes to be the compelling nature of the considerations which exclude
both reason and the passions.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 49.