The one most Anglophone thinkers are thinking of, when they use the word, is what is called the Scottish, also including English, enlightenment. It is what I call the dumber enlightenment that Professor Kaiser normally seems to mean.
You can think of it as the Locke, Hume, Smith, Malthus, Darwin, Bentham, Mill, "Jefferson founding fathers" social contractarian enlightenment.
You can think of it as the Locke, Hume, Smith, Malthus, Darwin, Bentham, Mill, "Jefferson founding fathers" social contractarian enlightenment.
This is the one Palmer best pillories in this classic passage, but his narrative mingles the two together to some extent:
"Paradoxically, the men who trusted so highly in the powers of intelligence regarded the mind as essentially vacant and inert; the idea of the passive mind was indispensable to their system. it was the guarantee that the truths of nature might be perceived without distortion. It was the basis for the distinction, then so important and so clear, between enlightenment and prejudice. It was the metaphysical groundwork for the belief that men were equal, and that they possessed the quality of perfectibility, that is, susceptibility to progress. Minimizing the effects of will, denying original predisposition, refusing to see any inevitability in human nature, the doctrine was flatly contrary to the Christian idea of sin; and by representing man as a passive child of circumstances, easily abused by his environment, it slipped sometimes into a notion that human nature, when crude, is good; and that order, restraint, discipline, and suppression are affronts to man's dignity and freedom." Catholics and Unbelievers in 18th Century France, Index Locke, Diderot, Rousseau, etc. Palmer, p 133, 134
The other enlightenment, the merely dumb one, on the continent, was more rationalistic, more grounded in an active mentality with Kant's insights, also Aquinas rather than Augustine, and going back to Greek idealism and Aristotle.
So, the continental rationalist, the dumb; and the British Isles and American colonists founding father empiricist, the dumber, enlightenments.
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