#counter-enlightenment

[historyandphilosophy]

Isaiah Berlin / Philosophy

ISAIAH BERLIN WAS A LATVIAN-BORN BRITISH SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THEORIST, PHILOSOPHER AND HISTORIAN OF IDEAS.

[arcane-offerings]

Jay Sherry, Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative, Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Paperback edition. https://www.ebay.com/itm/254624881682

[suburbanidiocies]

Note on the Enlightenement and Judaism

In “Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia” Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss make the case for the Enlightenment against postmodernism. To what extent it’s fair to say that  Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, et al. are reducible to a turn towards Nietzsche and Heidegger and all that those names represent is a large question. Here I just want to make a more limited point about the use of anti-Semitism to mark a dividing line between modern irrationalism and the philosophical line of descent which Frim and Fluss want to uphold.

Setting up a sharp distinction between the Counter-Enlightenment and the Enlightenment, the authors emphasize the different attitudes towards Jews represented by the two movements. The former tendency scapegoated the Jew as a bearer of skepticism and cosmopolitanism, while the latter created spaces for the inclusion of religious minorities within the broader culture.. Like many easy generalizations there is a partial truth to this. However this binary simplifies the complexity of the Enlightenement’s relationship to Judaism. Civic emancipation was indeed a goal of many proponents of the Aufklärung. However at the same time there was a strong distaste for the continued existence of Jews as Jews. Assimilation would end the wall of separation between peoples, but this necessarily entailed the surrender of offensive particularity on the altar of universal human brotherhood.This attitude was in part a continuation of older Christian polemics against the synagogue. But it also contained new elements . Hostility  to “superstition” included as its targets the cultural practices of non-Christians which refused absorption into European civilization. Further, having lost their former status as living testaments to the truth of the Gospel, Jews were now under suspicion as being the ultimate origin of the Abrahamic faiths. In the case of people like d’Hollabach, prefiguring Nietzsche, Judaism was explicitly accused of having birthed the poison of Christianity that had overwhelmed the sweetness and light of the ancient world. Finally, there were also symptoms of a racializing discourse that located the moral and philosophical failures of Judaism in the national character of the Jews themselves. This prefigured the secularized antisemitism of the 19th century which grew up side by side with modernization.

Here is non-exhaustive list of anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by Enlightenment thinkers and by Hegel, the heir of that tradition which Harrison an Fluss wish to valorize.

Voltaire

“ The Jewish nation dare to display an irreconcilable hatred toward all nations and revolts against all masters ; always superstitious , always greedy for the well-being enjoyed by others , always barbarous , cringing in misfortune and insolent in prosperity ”

From Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of Nations

“You seem to me to be the maddest of the lot. The Kaffirs, the Hottentots, and the Negroes of Guinea are much more reasonable and more honest people than your ancestors, the Jews. You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables in bad conduct and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny.”—Voltaire, From a letter to a Jew who had written to him, complaining of his antisemitism in Essay on the Customs of the Spirit of Nations.

Diderot

“We cannot expect to find among the Jews exactitude of ideas or precision in style; in short, everything which characterizes a sound philosophy. On the contrary we find a confused mixture of principles of reason and of revelation, an affected and frequently impenetrable obscurity of principles, which cause fanaticism, a blind respect for the authority of the doctors and antiquity; in short, all the defects peculiar to an ignorant and superstitious nation. ”

From The Encyclopedia

d’Holbach

“Dare therefore at last, oh Europe, to shake off the intolerable yoke of the prejudices which afflict you. Leave to the stupid Hebrews, to the frenzied imbeciles, and to the cowardly and degraded Asiatics these superstitions which are as vile as they are mad. They are not meant for the inhabitants of your clime.”

From The Spirit of Judaism

“It must in fact be admitted that even while they perished the Jews were well avenged on the Romans, their conquerors. From the ruins of their country, a fanatic sect emerged which gradually polluted the whole Empire.”

From The Spirit of Judaism

Kant:

“The euthanasia of Judaism is pure moral religion….”

From The Conflict of the Faculties

Hegel

“The Jewish multitude was bound to wreck [Jesus’s] attempt to give them the consciousness of something divine, for faith in something divine, something great, cannot make its home in a dunghill. The lion has no room in a nest, the infinite spirit none in the prison of a Jewish soul….”  

From The Spirit of Christianity

“It may be said of the Jews that it is precisely because they stand directly before the door of salvation that they are and have been the most reprobate and abandoned.”

From The Phenomenology of Spirit

None of this is meant to be a “gotcha” that shows that all these thinkers and what they stood for were merely products of prejudice. Complex centuries spanning movements of human thought and culture are not refuted in that way. Rather, my point is that treating the Counter-Enlightenment as the Eternal Evil Other of the Enlightenment is an easy way of avoiding the ambiguities of the history and language we have inherited and still inhabit. 

All this should tell us that it is not enough to proclaim unity in order to avoid the pitfalls of prejudice. All robust universalisms must at some point or another say that  “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female.” But if this principle of solidarity is proclaimed without regards for difference, it becomes an engine of one sided annexation by those within the sacred circle of history’s elect. Pluralism must be cultivated if oneness is to be something more than an exercise in a domination that cannot tolerate anything outside of itself.

[theminervanrepublic]

The History of Leninist and Bolshevik Tactics to Displace Republican Institutions

THE HISTORY OF LENINIST AND BOLSHEVIK TACTICS TO DISPLACE republican institutions is a deeply under-examined chapter in modern political history, especially in the United States. It is however a well-documented case study in how revolutionary movements can systematically undermine liberal-republican forms. Its relative obscurity in American discourse stems from a combination of ideological…

The History of Leninist and Bolshevik Tactics to Displace Republican Institutions

[theminervanrepublic]

Borrowed Architecture: Counter-Enlightenment Structures in Modern Defenses of Republicanism

“Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.” (“For knowledge itself is power.”) FRANCIS BACON, MEDITATIONES SACRAE (1597) A deep contradiction lies at the heart of much contemporary American political rhetoric: anti-republican and anti-Enlightenment intellectual structures, originally forged by Counter-Revolution thinkers, are routinely deployed to defend the Constitution, the Founders, and republican…

Borrowed Architecture: Counter-Enlightenment Structures in Modern Defenses of Republicanism

[steviebee77]

Integrating Christian Theology and Psychology: Part Two

Integrating Christian Theology and Psychology: Part Two

By Steven Barto, B.S., Psy., M.T.S. A NUMBER OF PHILOSOPHERS of the Enlightenment began publishing their thoughts in the late 1600s to early 1700s, and detractors almost immediately took on the task of stating their objections. Public debate began in Europe and Western Civilization whose echoes can be heard today. Enlightenment was characterized by skepticism toward religious dogma and other…

View On WordPress

[froschperspektiven]

Carl Sagan, 1995

[gocrazydelusionstudent]

Alt-right conspiracy theorists have embraced postmodern philosophy. The Left should return to the Enlightenment to oppose their irrational and hateful politics.

by Landon Frim & Harrison Fluss