[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

Pure Rationalism has existed since before Christ, as has religious tolerance, and especially secularism.

well i think rationalism has its roots in the past but even the greeks, who supposedly started the reason racket, were deeply embedded in religion. socrates was killed for corrupting young people and offending the gods or something of that sort--the gods! aristotle is perhaps the first person to attempt to detach reason from religion, but he lived in a world ruled by superstition and monarchies (alexander was son and grandson of macedonian kings). the egyptians, babylonians, assyrians, sumerians, ancient chinese, etc, while having great cultural achievements, were mostly ruled by religious thought.

religious tolerance however goes way back to various times and cultures in society, as you say. but in our time it comes straight from the enlightenment and this still stands.

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

These are old things, deeply imbedded in human society, but it is the very colonialist expansion that resulted from the so-called Enlightenment that came to hide and even destroy these concepts, with exploitation peaking in African Slavery and Nazism. The Enlightenment in its fullness, birthed the thinkers and philosophies that hold one race superior and another inferior. In fact, it is the Enlightenment that invented the European concept of Race and Ethnicity, that defines racism itself!

well i explained in an earlier post that modern racism in my view precedes the enlightenment. look into the spanish renaissance and baroque, and the whole "purity of blood" issue that dominated life those days. "old christians" (epitomized by germanic goths) and "new christians" (jewish converts) had very different places in society. go and read quevedo, a baroque poet, and you'll find his work oozing with rabid racist jokes and stereotypes against jews and moors. and i mean rabid! not sure if you can find a translation of "vida de el buscon", a novel he wrote, but it's full of examples.

racism only found new clothes during the enlightenment, but it certainly did not originate from it.

as far as slavery goes, it is an ancient practice that goes back to the dawn of history and perhaps further... the spanish enslaved the indians since their arrival in the americas... on the basis that they "didn't have souls"-- friar bartolome de las casas argued successfully before the spanish crown that they did (!!) and won some legal victory that did not reflect much in everyday life, except to increase the import of african slaves-- cos they "didn't have a soul"... so it was ok to treat them as animals.

the portuguese had already started the slave trade in the 15th century by the way. that's at least a couple of centuries before the enlightenment. but there was african complicity in this-- many african kingdoms happily did business with the slave traders.

about the nazis: hitler was more influenced by romanticism than by the enlightenment. the notions of the "people" and "blood" and "national destiny" and all that crapola are nothing but romantic bullshit. i mean check out his frantic speeches and tell me what in hell is rational about them. so i'm going to place the blame for nazism square on the shoulders of the romantics, not on the enlightenment, who were a bunch of sensible people, not rabid dogs.

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

The South Africans, the Indians, the South and Central Americans, the Vietnamese, were not influenced by the Enlightement, they were reacting to the fucked up situation that the shitstem puts entire peoples into.

yes they were reacting but i have to respectfully disagree with you here. these liberation movements combine tradition with modern ideas. the notions of universal equality IS a notion of the enlightement. it just wasn't worked out fully at the time it was formulated, but hopefully it continues to make progress to this day.

for example, the liberated south africans did not go back to having a zulu king and waging tribal warfare-- that was their tradition. south africa remains a liberal democracy-- a child of the enlightenment as well as a child of african traditions.

the south and central americans i know well: all political liberation movements in the 20th century were marxist-based. marxism stems directly from hegelian philosophy. fidel castro was a lawyer before he became dictator-for-life. che guevara was a medical student from an argentinian middle class family & i guarantee you there is no more european-oriented country in latin-american than argentina. the list goes on & on.

earlier times: tupac amaru, who rose against spanish rule in the XVIII century, was a descendent of inca kings educated by jesuits-- ah those jesuits! they were behind a lot of the independentists movements of the early XIX century. they, and the masons...

viet nam: ho chi minh was a communist, raised as a confucian.

algeria: more of a mess i don't know too well but there were nationalists and communists trying to kick out the french.

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

Until Europe is no longer the standard from which the world is judged, both in history and today, then the world will remain a fucked up place.

well with this i completely agree with you and i hope it happens soon. my point i guess is that european culture is not going to get off other people's asses until it goes through, not just half-assed, with the promise of the enlightenment-- universal liberty, equality, & fraternity. that's the core of my whole argument i guess.

anyway man thanks for the discussion. i really enjoy the exchange of ideas-- you've made me see some things from a different point of view. thanks for that.

[saoq]

hello

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

well i think rationalism has its roots in the past but even the greeks, who supposedly started the reason racket, were deeply embedded in religion. socrates was killed for corrupting young people and offending the gods or something of that sort--the gods! aristotle is perhaps the first person to attempt to detach reason from religion..

yes and no. ofcourse the greeks used reason - reading one page off aristotle proves that-, but above reason, above the gods, they put the Ananke (Necessity), mother of the fates. they viewed that the world is a cosmos, an organised-totality; within this organised totality gods express their power, and mortals use logos; but what holds this totality of beings as whole is chaos, meaning not confusion but chasm, clift, gap.

Aristotle comes after the greek ''Enlightment''. He used a good two centuries of intense philosophising and intense political changes, and makes the sweetest philosophy sofar (imho). the Sophists -say Protagoras- are propably the first ones to use reason in a modern way.


We can either view Enlightment as a specific period in human history/philosophy, OR -using the definition i mentioned above or something better- think that there's Enlightment wherever and whenever men and women exit from their self-imposed immatury and use reason.

[Glice]

Ok, I can't be bothered to read every post, sorry if I'm going over old ground.

Yes, pitfalls, good and bad in both - I'm keen on the Adornian idea of seeing the enlightenment as part of a continuum ('Odysseus as the prototype for the bourgeouis individual') and the Kuhn's (or Lakatos', I always confuse the two) notion of paradigm shifts.

Which is to say that it's faintly ridiculous to criticise the enlightenment because first of all it's part of an ongoing continuum and second of all it's a past paradigm shift - modernism's thrust is a paradigm shift which moves us away from the notion of a 'pure' enlightenment; there are those who would argue that post-modernism is a sub-shift, but I would say that modernism hasn't quite run its course as of yet.

The flaws in enlightenments ration have surely been played out by now - we know the errors in its process (which applies to the ridiculous arguments of Berkley and the like) and what appeals to Platonic notions of universal forms (Kant, Hegel).

Don't we?