Thursday, December 13, 2018
Some thoughts on our President
professor
Great post for the special moment we are in.
It seems to me that we have a system and a President based on Enlightenment principles, reason, and on the public welfare or public good.
These principles, of the so called Enlightenment, were already largely passe at the time of the founding of the American republic. But they enshrined them as remnants here.
Our system, our remnants, was not really based on the European Enlightenment as such, which required the old European Order to even make it make sense as an intellectual system, but rather a bastardization of it.
In my view, the enlightenment in its original meaning, ended more or less around the time of the French Revolution, with the challenge which that revolution posed to the old European Order, only within which did the concept of enlightenment even make sense.
It certainly did not begin with it, or continue long after it, although the Old European Order limped along for another hundred or so years in the post enlightenment.
What you call enlightenment, and the age of reason, have a different meaning, one which I call post enlightenment. It is an age of many isms, but enlightenment and the age of reason was not one of them.
Friday, November 4, 2016
THE CLIMAX OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Palmer thought that the climax was represented both by the triumphant French Republic of 1798, and by the Republic of Terror of 1794, together.
This makes some sense. Yet I would refer to these, analytically as an aftermath, myself.
I would have placed what I consider the end of the Enlightenment as such as the eve of the French Revolution in 1789.
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