LISTEN. The Master of Liberal Arts summer course inspired by Steve Pinker's book begins tonight. "Enlightenment Now" zooms Tuesdays at 6, all summer except for my date in mid-June with a couple of surgeons who offer a major improvement in my ambulation, and another a month later in Kansas for that conference I try never to miss (and missed last time only because COVID postponed it).
Opening Days (and Nights) are always about introductions, to one another and to our course, prompted by some basic questions. Who are you? and Why are you here? And, this time, What does enlightenment mean to you?
Who am I? A long-time student and teacher of philosophy, a pragmatic pluralist fond of the thought of William James (wrote William James's "Springs of Delight") and John Dewey, a peripatetic in the Lyceum tradition (Solvitur ambulando), a lover of dogs and baseball and beer, midwestern by birth but cosmopolitan by temperament, an Anglophile (I'd rather listen to the BBC than NPR), a proud father of two young adult women (the younger of whom just graduated from our institution, the older an LA creative who's going to make world-changing films)...
Why am I here? To learn, to teach, to lend a hand, to do no harm if I can help it, to cultivate our garden (not just mine), to transmit some sort of heritage to Dewey's " continuous human community" to come (see below#)... I'm here in Tennessee because that's where Vanderbilt is, I'm at MTSU in part because Belmont's provost two decades ago decided their philosophy department should not employ someone with overt Unitarian sympathies ("Our beliefs are diverse and inclusive. We have no shared creed...Our shared covenant (seven Principles) supports 'the free and responsible search for truth and meaning'...We think for ourselves...”)
What does enlightenment mean to me? A lot. It'll take all summer to say. But for starters...
Pinker's subtitle begins to answer that, proposing to make a case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Reason, the ability and the will to apply experience-based intelligence in meeting the practical challenges of living and ameliorating the human condition... Science, the best testable tool we've got for understanding the world and our place in it... Humanism, which Kurt Vonnegut* said means in part "trying to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishment" in some imagined post-human, post-mortem limbo... Progress, the commitment to doing all we can to make things better for all of our kind, now and in the future... Or as John Dewey put it in the concluding lines of A Common Faith (1934) that became his epitaph,
The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the #continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of humanity. It remains to make it explicit and militant.
Susan Neiman's Kantian answer to the question her title poses, Why Grow Up, is also mine: growing up means repudiating our increasingly self-inflicted immaturity and embracing the responsibilities of thinking for ourselves. “A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.” g'r
In other words, Sapere aude... But don't just have the courage to think for yourself, act from that courage as well. Mr. Jefferson acted plenty, but dodged the biggest act of courage available to him. Still, he's a pretty good exemplar of American enlightenment... to a point well short of liberty and justice for all. He was right, though, to identify happiness as our great individual and social aspiration.
Some of the additional texts I've recommended help fill out my answer: enlightenment means the intelligent pursuit of happiness.
From The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 by Ritchie Robertson--"Recently, the case for the Enlightenment has been put with particular eloquence by the psychologist Steven Pinker and the philosopher Susan Neiman...From The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret Jacob--Whether by freeing people from false beliefs or by increasing their material well-being, the pursuit of happiness, long before Thomas Jefferson used the phrase in drafting the American Declaration of Independence, was the overriding purpose of enlightened thought and activity."
From The Enlightenment and why it still matters by Anthony Pagden--"[Hume] left religion largely out of the story of progress, but noted that superstition holds back all who seek to be 'in the pursuit of their interest and happiness'..."“'In a century as enlightened as ours,' he declared emphatically, 'it has finally been demonstrated ...that there is ...only one life and only one happiness,' and that is here on Earth..."He was wrong about the cosmos, I hope; other life surely must have evolved out there somewhere, in all that infinite space-time. But for us, the earth--as Carl Sagan said--is where we make our stand.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. Pale Blue Dot (1994)Enlightenment about the fragility of our abode and humility in the face of human conceits also means to me, as it did to William James, "a certain lightness of heart"...
Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher. Will to Believe
And *Vonnegut said something else I consider enlightened, in the voice of one of his fictional alter egos:“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
We're not there yet. Let's keep going.
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