What Is Enlightenment?

It is unfortunate--beyond unfortunate, really, and bordering on the tragic--the degree to which posturing is substituted for thinking in the Academy. That Michel Foucault, for instance, and the "post-modernism" with which he is so frequently associated, would be set against Kant and the Enlightenment project with which he is associated, should cause thinking people absolutely no satisfaction; if anything, such oppositions should cause scholars embarrassment and pain. For these disputes represent nothing so much as a form of intellectual parricide. If the Enlightenment project was not constructed upon a scaffolding of rational critique (beginning, as with Kant, with a critique of reason itself), then there was no Enlightenment and, if there was no Enlightenment, then there can be no coherent assertion of a Counter-Enlightenment--the banner under which "post-modernists" mount their charge.

Every now and then a scholar, usually obscure, challenges the Received Tradition of Posturing Cant (often in the name of Kant), and attempts to set the record straight. Occidental College's Kory Schaff is one such scholar:

The Enlightenment has left us with "normative superstition," or a healthy form of skepticism about the justification of modern institutions and ideals. Along these lines, I adopt an interpretation of Foucault that diverges from the standard view. I argue that he shares with his detractors a common heritage of the "critical attitude," placing him squarely in line with Kant, Hegel and critical theory generally. If it is possible to view this critical attitude as an expression of Enlightenment-oriented views, then there are reasons to believe that his so-called postmodernism is nothing more than hyper-modernism [or what I like to call "modernism in high gear"--R.R.R.]. The general lines of this last argument have been made elsewhere, most notably in Robert Pippin's important work [Modernism As A Philosophical Problem], but there is a need to situate Foucault in the unfolding narrative of modernity, rather than label him a hostile opponent to it... [Schaff, Human Studies 25: 323-332, 2002].

In my own view, the "need" for revising the "narrative of modernity" as it unfolds in the hands of the most egregious of Posturers arises from the fact that the world is on fire; this is no time for intelligent people to be at one another's throats, settling scores that, when all is reduced to smoldering ash, amount to nothing. There is much work to be done by the intellectual fire brigades. Let us roll up our collective sleeves, each grab a bucket, and get to work.

Kant and Max Weber

Yet another installment in the record of scholarly blindness:

"Weber's place in the German idealist tradition is a neglected area in Weber scholarship. It was not until the past decade that, for example, the all too apparent influence Nietzsche exerted on Weber received systematic attention ... Equally apparent, yet even less investigated, is the Kantian link. Except for the interest in the neo-Kantian epistemology of Weber's time (via such figures as Rickert and Windleband), Kant has been all but completely left out in contextualizing Weber's thought ... For a brief yet strong argument for the Kantian nature of Weber's examination of modernity, see Ernest Gellner, who claims, 'Thus the preoccupations of Kant and of Weber are really the same. One was a philosopher and the other a sociologist, but there, one might say, the difference ends. It is of course a very significant distinction. They saw the same problem, but Kant saw it as a universal one, which concerned man as such; Weber saw it as a differential problem--concerning why some men, but some men only, saw the world in a certain way and acted in a certain manner.' See his Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) 184-95" Sung Ho Kim, Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2004), fn. 80, p. 53.

Kant and the Power of Imagination

"...in the mid-twentieth century rush to make Kant palatable to Anglo-American analytic philosophers, much that was central to Kant's work was initially ignored, down-played, or simply dismissed..." Jane Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2007), p. 21,

Kant, Rousseau, and Romanticism

When I was a freshman in college, a philosophy professor of mine (who was actually an historian of philosophy) warned me that academic philosophy was crippled by its steadfast refusal to examine ideas in their full-blooded historical context. I went on to major in philosophy and discovered, to my chagrin, that my professor's warning was spot on. Since then (the late 1970's-early 1980's), there have been modest advances in the field such as the hybrid discipline of the "history and philosophy of science." But rarely are ideas ever adequately embedded in their historical context by academic philosophers, and one can certainly understand why: because ideas, thoroughly historicized, tend to lose their universal validity. Or that is the fear, anyway. But how is it, one must ask, that a loss of universality as such is not compensated for by the corresponding gain in historicity? Take, for example, the case of Immanuel Kant.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has been called the worst written of great books. All of Kant's work is hampered by a difficult style. And this is without question one factor in the difficulty one encounters when reading him. But another factor in my view is the disservice done to Kant by the majority of his interpreters who, with few exceptions, de-contextualize Kant, making his thought even less approachable.

All of Kant's interpreters acknowledge that he was raised in a household of devout Lutheran pietists. And yet, astonishingly, most of those interpreters are unwilling to consider the possibility that Kant's philosophical output ought to be read in the light of his pietistic upbringing. This scholarly refusal appears to reflect an assumption that piety and criticism are entirely incompatible modes. Consequently, the father of "critical philosophy" could not possibly have harbored any pietistic leanings in his thinking. Instead, the regularity of his personal habits are viewed as the vestiges of his pietism and nothing else. This assumption (a prejudice, really) distorts Kant's philosophic project in general but permits him to be placed among the forefront of Enlightenment thinkers--where Enlightenment is to piety what matter is to anti-matter.

Kant's debt to Hume is always celebrated; the fact that he kept a portrait of Rousseau (another contrarian Enlightenment figure) above his desk is rarely mentioned and, when mentioned, almost never commented upon. But Kant, like Rousseau, was not only an Enlightenment figure, he was, as well, a counter-Enlightenment figure: for neither he nor Rousseau were completely at home with the radically secular wings of the European Enlightenment and both--yes, both--are crucial precursors to what would be later known as the Romantic revolution.

The Paterian Precursor: John Ruskin

"Ruskin never gave up insisting that all art, literature included, was worship, but this insistence does not make him either a 'religious' or a 'moral' critic of literature. Though he moved in outward religion from Evangelical Protestantism to agnostic naturalism and on finally to a private version of primitive Catholicism, Ruskin's pragmatic religion always remained a Wordsworthian 'natural piety,' in which aesthetic and spiritual experience were not to be distinguished from one another. Ruskin's literary taste was formed by the King James Bible, more than any other reading, and therefore from the start he associated expressive and devotional values. In this also he stands with the great Romantics, whose theories of the Imagination are all displaced, radical Protestant accounts of the nakedness of the soul before God."

From Harold Bloom's essay on Ruskin in Essayists and Prophets.

Another Comrade in the Visionary Company

Harold Bloom on Walter Pater:

1. Pater's "value inheres neither in his accuracy at the direct interpretation of meaning in texts nor in his judgments of relative eminence of works and authors. Rather, he gives us a vision of art through his own unique sensibility, and so his own writings obscure the supposed distinction between criticism and creation. 'Supposed,' because who can convince us of that distinction? To adapt Shelley's idea of the relation between poetry and the universe, let us say that criticism creates the poem anew, after the poem has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration."

2. Pater's key terms as a critic are 'perception' and 'sensation,' which is response to perception. 'Vision' for Pater, as for Blake, is a synonym for Coleridge's or Wordsworth's 'Imagination,' and Pater further emulated Blake by questing after the 'spiritual form' of phenomena as against 'corporeal form.' This is the 'form' that: 'Every moment...grows perfect in hand or face,' according to the almost preternaturally eloquent 'Conclusion' to The Renaissance."

3. "For this is Pater's Gospel, but it is Ruskin's manifesto: '...the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.'"

4. "What Wordsworth called 'spots of time,' periods of particular splendor or privileged moments testifying to the mind's power over the eye, Ruskin had turned from earlier, as being dubious triumphs of the pathetic fallacy. Pater, who subverted Ruskin by going back to their common ancestor, Wordsworth, may be said to have founded his criticism upon privileged moments of vision, or 'epiphanies' as Joyce's Stephen, another Paterian disciple, was to term them."

5. "Pater's strange achievement is to have assimilated Wordsworth to Lucretius, to have compounded an idealistic naturalism with a corrective materialism. By de-idealizing the epiphany, he makes it available to the coming age, when the mind will know neither itself nor the object but only the dumbfoundering abyss that comes between."

6. "An Epicurean or hedonistic askesis is only superficially a paradox, since it is central in the Lucretian vision that Pater labored to attain."

7. "His great achievement...was to empty Ruskin's aestheticism of its moral bias, and so to purify a critical stance appropriate for the apprehension of Romantic art. More than Swinburne, Morris, Rossetti, he became the father of Anglo-American Aestheticism, and subsequently the direct precursor of a Modernism that vainly attempted to be Post-Romantic. I venture the prophecy that he will prove also to be the valued precursor of a Post-Modernism still fated to be another Last Romanticism."

From H.B.'s essay on Pater reprinted in Essayists and Prophets (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005).

A Further Irony

A further irony of Edward Said's criticism of Northrop Frye lies in the fact that Said's limited grasp of history (the very thing for which he chastised Frye) prevented him from recognizing the implicitly revolutionary nature of Frye's embrace of Blake.

For to adopt a Blakean stance is to open the door to radical politics: the kind of politics that Blake himself espoused and that threatened to "turn the world" of mid-seventeenth century England "upside down."

Frye's politics were a left-leaning bourgeois liberalism--fairly tepid by Blake's standards and by Said's (not to mention this author's). In Frye's defense, however, he spent most of his adult life during a portion of the 20th century that saw left-liberalism make solid gains in the implemented policies of the democracies of Europe, Scandinavia, and North America. Frye's confidence in the reformist programs of Western governments was reposed in facts on the ground and thereby warranted. The hyperbolic posturings of the "academic Left" no doubt struck him as beside the point. It was a different time than the one we inhabit now. Said's critique makes no allowance for Frye's historical context.

The political implications of Blakean humanism were succinctly expressed by one of Blake's radical precursors, Gerrard Winstanley, in a tract entitled A Watch-Word to the City of London (1649):

Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he hath enemies ... True freedom lies in the community in spirit and community in the earthly treasury, and this is Christ the true man-child spread abroad in the creation, restoring all things unto himself (cited by Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, London: Penguin (1991): 107).

What would become Blake's humanistic Christology, with its wealth re-distributing political implications, is set out quite clearly in Winstanley's tract for anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see. We can only speculate what Frye would make of the present political climate in North America were he still with us; based upon his close reading of Blake and his subsequent articulation of a Blakean humanism, one can only imagine that his left-Liberalism would be far less tepid than it was in the latter half of the 20th century.