Source of this article: "Enlightenment with the Times"
From: Don't eat me
Editor's note: Another theory is that the word enlightenment is too extravagant and redemption is pretty much the same. ---------------------
The author | Xu Ben, Professor of English at St. Mary's College in California, USA
The 18th century Enlightenment philosophers were intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment. At that time, there was no such thing as "intellectuals", but, as Stephen Büller said in His Book Reaffirming the Enlightenment, "The Enlightenment paid tribute to the intellectuals and their representatives, and gave us a new understanding of intellectuals.". The Enlightenment showed the social role of the intellectuals for the first time, and its representatives began to assume a new social role, that is, to fight against despotism with freedom. Before the Enlightenment, there were already intellectuals who questioned religious and political repression, and some even played the role of the conscience of the times. But the intellectuals see themselves as propagators of the values of freedom, and in this way become critics and reformers of the social status quo, and such intellectuals' self-consciousness and public responsibility were formed in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, and became a special legacy left to us by this era.
Pierre Bayle, the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher, first coined the term "Republic of letters," which we still seem to be digesting today as the intellectual legacy of our citizens consists of two aspects that appear to be separate but are in fact mutually exclusive: first, the publicity of knowledge, and second, the professionalism of knowledge. To this day, how to reconcile these two aspects remains a key question of how intellectuals position themselves. Is the social role of an intellectual limited to his contribution to his expertise? Or do you need to break through the limitations of the small circle of expertise and appeal to the wider public?
Let's start with the publicity of knowledge. The literate republic of the Enlightenment, although its citizens were intellectuals, wrote not only to each other, but also to the more ordinary and educated people in society. This orientation influenced their intellectual habits, behavior patterns, and discursive characteristics. They believe that "the most important ideas should be applicable, passed on to others, effective, and relevant to society." In The Last Intellectual, Russell Jacobi argues that today's intellectuals inherit the public character of the Enlightenment, treating "ordinary or educated people as listeners... Obviously, this excludes intellectuals whose works are too professional or too esoteric to be accepted by the public." The symbolism of the Enlightenment represents that it is the public knowledge of this nature that the Encyclopedia wants to disseminate.
"Enlightenment with the Times"
Xu Ben
Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore
January 2021
The antithesis of public knowledge is not private knowledge, but knowledge that does not care about social functioning at all, to which Jacobi writes: "It has been argued that when public culture declines, intellectuals who are not accepted by the public, the 'private intellectuals,' thrive. It seems to me that this is a myth. The relationship between 'private' and 'public' mental labor is complex. There is a symbiotic relationship between them, to say the least. The great figures, from Galileo to Freud, were not content with 'private' discoveries; they sought and discovered the public. "Publicness is a social responsibility and function that intellectuals consciously construct for themselves. Intellectuals are public because they actively intervene in and participate in discussions on fundamental issues of public life, such as justice and justice, truth and facts, the powers and responsibilities of government, and the rights and duties of the people. These are all public issues, and they are also issues that the general public needs to pay attention to. However, the average person is too busy with their daily livelihoods, has no time and energy, or lacks the ability to think deeply about problems, and is in fact unable to really care about these issues. In this case, raising these issues and discussing them becomes the responsibility and function of intellectuals. Their influence on the population is measured by whether they understand them, to what extent they trust them, and under what circumstances they agree with them.
At different stages of history, the main occupational groups that paid special attention to and were good at discussing these issues were not the same. The typical intellectuals from the 1890s to the 1940s were mostly literary scholars, "whether you think of George Bernard Shaw, or Emile Zola, André Gide, Jean Paul Sartre or Stephen Zweig, these people have all succeeded in translating their literary achievements into popular influence." From the 1940s to the 1970s, intellectuals with a public character were more "social scientists of all kinds: historians, anthropologists or sociologists, and sometimes philosophers." As universities grew larger during this period, many of them were university professors, "more likely to be those who taught at the academy than wrote novels." ”
Look at the professionalism of knowledge. Professionalism does not only refer to the specialized field of knowledge, but also refers to the evaluation and recognition of the value of knowledge by relying on the independent group that is qualified to do so. The literal republics were the groups that played this role during the Enlightenment. The pioneers of the scientific revolution and the forerunners of the Enlightenment of the 17th century had begun to liberate the intellectuals from the Catholic system of dogma and theological domination, and they gradually formed independent institutions with secular orientations, such as the Royal Society in London, the Academy of Sciences in Paris, the Academy of Sciences in Naples, and the Collegium Curosive in Germany, whose main function was to promote a free exchange of ideas, with participants not only in academic circles but also in society. Gradually, salons, cafes, town councils, public speeches, theaters, and libraries of new size brought the exchange of ideas from academic circles into society, forming what Habermas called the bourgeois public space, which formed and depended on a rule of equality, tolerance, and respect for common sense reason. Such public spaces later became the social basis of the democratic revolution.
The tendency to privatize modern society is an important reason for the decline of public life, or it can be said that the decline of public life induces people in society to develop their lives more and more in the direction of privatization. The privatization of intellectual life, in addition to having common characteristics with the privatization of ordinary people, is also manifested in the privatization of their knowledge, that is, a narrow professionalism. The American sociologist Richard Sennett, in his book The Decline of the Public Man, argues that for most people, public life is at best a formal obligation, manifested as "going with the flow." They "remain indifferent to the affairs of the state, and their indifference is reflected in their treatment of political events." In their view, the etiquette of treating strangers and the ceremonial interaction with strangers are at best analogous and boring; at worst, they are hypocritical. Strangers are dangerous in themselves." What happens to strangers has nothing to do with them at all, and in intellectuals it does not concern themselves under the pretext of the limits of knowledge. Unfortunately, the kind of attacks on the lack of professionalism of public intellectuals that are now prevalent are helping to justify this excuse.
The American historian Steffen Pinker called the area of knowledge disseminated during the Enlightenment "blog circle" and the "global campus." The metaphor of blogospheres is used to facilitate the understanding of readers in today's Internet age. Pinker says it's impossible for readers who understand the history of ideas "not to be amazed by the 'blogging community' of the 18th century." Every book was sold out of the printing house, immediately sold out, immediately reprinted and printed, then translated into several languages, pamphlets and leaflets of commentary followed, scholars corresponded, and finally a new book was released. Thinkers like Locke and Newton wrote tens of thousands of letters. Voltaire alone wrote more than 18,000 letters and compiled 15 volumes. Of course, by today's standards, this dialogue is too slow to take weeks or even months to communicate, but it is fast enough to provoke discussion, criticism, convergence, refinement, and attention from those in power. The most famous example is Beccaria's On Crime and Punishment, which caused an uproar in European intellectual circles and promoted the abolition of torture throughout Europe."
Repackaging the knowledge of previous generations in new ways to convey new ideas. Communication itself has the effect of changing ideas, no idea can be spread intact, and no matter how clever the communicator of ideas is, it is impossible to know from the beginning what views are the most valuable and will be most interesting or accepted by others. Pinker writes, "The human mind is good at packing a complex thought and assembling it with other thoughts into more complex combinations, and then packaging this combination into a larger device, and then combining it with more other ideas. In order to do this, a steady and continuous supply of components is required, which must rely on a network of various exchanges of ideas. ”
Today, we have a digital communication network that did not exist in the 18th century, but this does not automatically become a free communication network. In contrast, the 18th century had a more competent network of communications because of its relative freedom, and although it was only a network sustained by print communications, it was vast and far-reaching, becoming what Pinker called a "global campus." He wrote: "A global campus not only increases the complexity of ideas, but also the quality of ideas. In the isolation of dwelling, it is inevitable that all kinds of strange and harmful thoughts will breed. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and after a harmful view is exposed, the criticism of other thinkers at least gives that view a chance to wither and die. In the 'Republic of Words', superstitions, dogmas, and wild histories do not last long, and the bad ideas that arise to control crime and manage the state are not long-lasting. It is foolish to set a man on fire and observe whether he will be burned to death to determine whether he is guilty. It is equally foolish to execute a woman for mating with the devil and turning him into a cat. Unless you yourself are hereditary absolute monarchs, you cannot agree with the bizarre theory that hereditary absolute monarchs are the best form of government. ”
This supranational blogosphere or global campus is not a club of literati, but a literal republic, a public space for speech. Stephen Brewler notes that what is active in this public space are "progressive activists and intellectuals." Without email and without computers, travel and communication were much more difficult than they are today. Due to censorship, high book prices, scarce libraries, and poor access to books, the 'Republic of Writing' was only an ideal, but it also became a reality to a certain extent, and its spirit was what Kant called 'Sapere audel'! or 'have the courage to use your own reason'". Stephen Brewler calls this "courageous use of your own reason" public space "international civil society."
The intellectuals of the 18th century did not have an organizational system and were not a strict school of thought. If they made up anything, it was just a loose combination of intellectuals, what historian Peter Guy called the "Enlightenment family." He wrote: "If the Philosophers of enlightenment are a family, then it is a noisy family. They were comrades-in-arms, and often had deep personal friendships, but apart from the greatest pleasure of advancing a common cause, they were secondly pleasured in criticizing their comrades-in-arms. They engaged in endless polemics with each other, some of which were entirely verbal and unceremonious. Many of the accusations of the Enlightenment by later generations—naïve optimism, arrogant rationalism, non-philosophical philosophicalization—were initially attacked by each other. Even some of the misconceptions that have been circulating since then are from Enlightenment philosophers: Voltaire created rumors of Rousseau's worship of primitive life, which Diderot and Wieland repeated; Hume and others were the first to misunderstand Voltaire's elegant wit as cynicism. ”
Today, some people divide the scholars of the Enlightenment age into two camps, "enlightenment" and "anti-enlightenment", but the Enlightenment family is not the kind of "party alliance" that we are accustomed to today, nor does it have the sense of "we-them" hostile camps. Guy vividly portrays the quarrels between the Enlightenment philosophers, "What makes their enemies schadenfreude is that the Enlightenment philosophers make their own atmosphere extremely tense: friends are emotional, quarrels are earth-shattering, reconciliations are sobby, and private affairs are boiling over. Diderot was generous with his shortcomings to others except Rousseau, but it was difficult for him to forgive D'Alembert for escaping due to caution when he co-edited the Encyclopedia with him. Voltaire liked those less talented than him, but showed him an uncomfortable and inexplicable respect for Diderot, and participated in the Encyclopedia, which he himself did not really think of." Voltaire was jealous of Diderot, and Diderot was not happy to hold Voltaire high, and although he praised Voltaire in a letter to a friend, he said that he behaved strangely. Diderot admired Voltaire's work and generosity, but somehow never trusted him. It was not until 1778 that the two met, when Voltaire returned to Paris and died shortly thereafter. As for the German Enlightenment, such as Lessing, "they maintained an alienated, decent, somewhat unpleasant relationship with the French: they adored the French, but were jealous." Rousseau was initially sought after by all, and then he rejected all men, and he was rejected by all, even by David Hume. The chubby Hume was ungrown, sociable, happy and generous. It seems that he was the only one who was widely popular, the beloved uncle of the Enlightened philosopher family."
What binds the conflicting Enlightenment philosophers to the same kind of people is a number of common ideas and worldviews that transcend their fierce quarrels with each other. Guy commented: "The Enlightenment philosophers did not have a party program, but they did form a party. Some of the most ugly accusations occur within the family and, once made public, are often whitewashed with a lot of polite rhetoric. In addition, outside harassment or fear of harassment drove enlightenment philosophers to think of what they had in common and to forget their differences. It is enough to learn that a book has been banned and burned, that a radical author has been thrown into prison, and that a piece of heretical text has been censored and deleted. They would gather in a procession, and the provocative officials would have to face a sudden battle: the storm caused by The Publication of the Spirit by Elves in 1758 and the ban on the Encyclopedia edited by Diderot the following year turned the Enlightened philosophers into a party, compared with Voltaire's hysterical call for unity. Critics who seek to destroy the movement have instead played a role in fueling the wave. In 1757, the newspaperman Fréron accused Malezeb, the head of the censorship of the newspaper, of being 'the head of a great gang, who was in charge of a large society.' Every day, this gang uses intrigue and trickery to develop and develop themselves'. But Malezeb still did everything in his power to protect the Enlightenment philosophers. At the time, it was also believed that "as everyone knows, these philosophical giants have an offensive and defensive alliance." In fact, to say that the Enlightened philosophers were a society or a group is only an unverifiable impression.
The various terms for the 18th-century group of intellectuals—the blogosphere, the global campus, the international civil society, the enlightenment family—all point to a limited group of scholars whose principles of freedom and equality are meant to be self-enlightened, and in this way to lead to enlightenment on a larger scale: to allow as many people as possible to mature as quickly as possible, to get rid of immaturity. Enlightenment is only meaningful to those who are ready for enlightenment, who have the conditions and the will to enlighten. Enlightenment was only an intellectual effort of limited anticipation and limited openness, and although the scope of the "finite" had changed, this finiteness had not changed much from the age of the Enlightenment in the 18th century to the present day.
Enlightenment is not a mass movement that envelops the masses, and it must be reformed rather than revolutionary. The Enlightenment of the Age of Enlightenment was open to people who were literate, and their number was increasing, but it was a minority after all. The enlightened crowd was not among the masses, but outside the Academy. Today this should still be the position of the Enlightened. Hume said that all previous knowledge was "confined to colleges and monasteries, isolated from the world," so he was determined to liberate knowledge so that all "those who could change" could know it. Kant was not an easy-to-understand philosopher, but he also wished he had written for the public monthly magazine that was not only read in college. But such a readership would not be large, and Kant argued that, at least in the beginning, enlightenment was only appropriate for "the knowledgeable to speak to the reading public." In time, when the rulers can be persuaded to adopt the opinions of the intellectuals, and when there is a good government, it will be possible for other people to enlighten themselves. Enlightenment alone cannot create a good government, and at best it can only produce for a good government the kind of people it needs, or suitable to help the government become better, and the kind of people who want the government to be better and know what kind of government is better. In this sense, it can be said that enlightenment is a long-term process of social reform. This was true in the 18th century, and nothing has changed today.