Enlighten up

"…The Enlightenment in general, and its greatest philosopher, Kant, in particular, are accused of holding reason in the sort of uncritical adulation earlier ages had for God. The frequency of the charge is puzzling in view of the fact that you needn't read much to see its foolishness–the very first sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason is a statement about reason's limits. Enlightenment thinkers never held reason to be unlimited; they just refused to let church and state be the ones to set the limits on what we can think. Nor is reason opposed to passion, a subject to which Enlightenment thinkers devoted nearly as much space as to thought. This was an age, after all, in which men and women wept in public over melodrama. For calling reason our highest faculty, Kant has been compared to the Reign of Terror and the Marquis de Sade, or less dramatically dismissed as dour, severe and slightly mad. Readers who do so misunderstand his conception of reason entirely. It's a large conception, embracing the capacity to do logic and mathematics and figure out the best means to getting whatever end you may happen to want tomorrow. But these, for Kant, are banal sorts of reasoning. Far more important is what he calls the real use of reason: the ability to form ideas of goodness, truth and beauty that orient us in action. Through those ideas, reason can make claims on nature and validate thereby our deepest longings. Pace fashionable caricatures, the Enlightenment's icon is not the cold, rule-obsessed technocrat but Mozart's self-possessed Figaro–the servant who uses his own reason to get the better of his feudal master in order to realize the passion that is deeper and truer than any the aristocracy can display.

Finally, and most recently, it's common to blame the Enlightenment for ecological disaster. Critics charge that Enlightenment thinkers' inclination to defend what they considered reasonable over what was considered natural set up an opposition between reason and nature which encouraged the human domination of nature that has so dramatically backfired in recent years. This objection ignores the fact that the Enlightenment appealed to nature more often than not, arguing that the claims of reason were more natural than the claims of arbitrary convention. Even more important, where reason was opposed to nature, it was in the interest of questioning conventions that tradition insisted were natural. Consider some of the things generally held to be natural at the start of the eighteenth century: poverty, slavery, the subjection of women, feudal hierarchies and most forms of illness. As late as the nineteenth century some English clerics would argue that efforts to relieve the Irish famine contravened the natural order willed by God. What is natural is contested. As Enlightenment thinkers realized, you cannot abolish slavery, overthrow existing hierarchies or cure illness unless you can show that they are not necessarily part of the way the world is. The ability to question what is natural and what is not is the first step towards any form of progress. The Enlightenment sought moral progress; technological progress was only desirable insofar as it brought humankind more happiness and freedom. To be sure, it was impossible to foresee every consequence of the technological advances the Enlightenment set in motion. But before you blame the Enlightenment for some of the technological advances we might do without, you might pause to be grateful for the processes it set in motion that doubled the lifetime you have in which to complain about it. Why turn to the Enlightenment? There is no better option. Rejections of the Enlightenment result in premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion; where Enlightenment is at issue, modernity is at stake. 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. Twenty-first-century Enlightenment must extend the work of the eighteenth by examining new dangers to freedom, and extending social justice. Growing up depends on both."

— Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age by Susan Neiman
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