David Bell, "Where do we come from?," in The New Republic, March 2, 2012, at p. 28.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), Franz Fritz, C.A. Kallen and John Pattergrove, trans.
Immanuel Kant, "What is Enlightenment?," in Berliner Monatschrift (1784).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
Christopher Norris, "What is Enlightenment?: Foucault on Kant," in The Trouble With Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 27-99.
Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
Marjorie Grene, ed., Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).
The Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1960).
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of Modern Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).
Richard Rorty, "Review of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age," in The London Review of Books, 1983.
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988). (Postmodern Spinoza.)
Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), F.G. Lawrence, trans.
Stephen Hawking, God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History (London: Running Press, 2005). (Gauss to Cantor to Godel and Turing.) ("Is the universe only a numbers game?")
F.L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600-1950 (New York: MacMillan, 1977).
I. Difficulties and Confusions in This Review.
David A. Bell's review of Professor Israel's examination of the Enlightenment is well-written and cautious, but suffers from some astonishing errors that lead me to conclude that the reviewer did not read this book. Perhaps Mr. Bell -- or whoever wrote this essay -- did not read all of the book. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!" and "Derek Parfit's Ethics.")
It is curious, for example, that in discussing the Enlightenment and its aftermath there is no mention of Hans Blumenberg's masterpiece, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, nor a detailed treatment of Jurgen Habermas defense of "The Enlightenment Project" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Despite not having read Professor Israel's book, I am sure that both of these texts by German philosophers were discussed in Democratic Enlightenment.
This reviewer claims that Professor Israel attributes the Enlightenment to the influence of Baruch Spinoza. This is strange since the book's title suggests a focus on the period from 1750 to 1790. Spinoza lived and wrote during the seventeenth century (1632-1677), remaining an esoteric and mostly forgotten philosopher until his rediscovery by the German inventors of the Enlightenment.
If this issue concerning chronology and the "anxiety of influence" is discussed by Professor Israel -- it must have been analyzed extensively! -- the analysis has escaped Mr. Bell's notice. Several more serious errors and confusions detract from this essay or review: For example, no effort is made to distinguish Enlightenment from Modernity. Spinoza is a Rationalist with a capital "R" and hardly a "radical materialist" nor an "empiricist." To suggest that Spinoza is the central figure for the "radical materialists" is absurd. This is especially true since "materialism" and "radical materialism" are not defined in Bell's review. (Bell, p. 32.)
Did "Andrew Ferguson" contribute in any way to this review that is, ostensibly, written by David A. Bell? ("Book Chats and Chits.")
If Spinoza (and not Kant) is the founding father for the Enlightenment -- the same Immanuel Kant whose essay "What is Enlightenment?" is usually said to define the movement -- then why is there no mention in this review of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskallah, or of Spinoza's contribution to that phenomenon?
No explanation is given. I am sure that Professor Israel has also discussed these issues.
This reviewer -- whoever he or she may be -- is doing a great disservice to David Bell and to Professor Israel, as well as to the readers of TNR. Borrowing comments from other reviewers of this book in France will not obscure the facts for intelligent readers. This scholarly work by Professor Israel is clearly the culmination of years of effort meriting a more serious response in the pages of an important journal of ideas and opinions. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Whatever!" then "What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
As I say, there is a failure to distinguish Modernity from Enlightenment in this review. Although the words are sometimes used synonymously in popular discussions, they refer to partly overlapping (if also separable) entities.
What is more, the history of philosophy is not distinguished from the history of ideas by "Mr. Bell." I suspect that the history of ideas is Professor Israel's primary concern in this book. Ideas lead to revolutions. This error by the reviewer compounds the confusions surrounding Spinoza's philosophy leaving us entirely "unenlightened."
Spinoza's contribution to the break with the medieval worldview and championing of what would be called "Modernity" in The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Ethics is misunderstood by the reviewer's curious alignment of this thinker with Lyotard's Report On the Postmodern Condition (presumably) as opposed to the so-called "Postmodern-Spinozist," Gilles Deleuze, who is not mentioned at all, see Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.
The final chapter of Deleuze's book makes clear Spinoza's importance to the German creators of the Enlightenment -- Kant and Hegel -- who reinvented Spinoza's geometrical method for an age of commerce.
Spinoza identified "bodies" or objects not with "radical materialism," by the way, but with systematic relations in a coherence rather than a correspondence model of truth.
Spinoza was mostly forgotten for about 100 years after his death. Germany's Aufklarung and all of the Romantics (Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England) appropriated Spinoza's work for purposes that would have seemed bizarre to the Spanish-Dutch Jew.
What mattered to the Enlightenment was not Spinoza's metaphysics nor his epistemology, but Spinoza's championing of the free-thinking individual in a new "Age of Reason."
An error repeated, constantly, by my adversaries in debate which reappears in TNR's review of Derek Parfit's ethics and, once more, in this review of Professor Israel's book is the bizarre assumption that idealism is opposed to empiricism. Since these terms are not defined by Mr. Bell, I cannot say what motivates this strange assumption. Idealism is not the same thing as Rationalism. Idealism is NOT opposed to empiricism. Nor is idealism an enemy of science. Empiricism -- especially today -- is not the same as materialism or radical materialism. ("David Stove's Critique of Idealism" and "G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")
After the Kantian "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy, "transcendental idealism" was made fully compatible with empiricism thereby contributing greatly to developments in science. ("John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.")
Einstein's relativity theory is the third so-called "Copernican Revolution" in Western civilization that is directly connected to Kant's achievement. It is no coincidence that the "revolution" in physics dating from the late nineteenth century and into our own era was largely a German cultural development from the premises of philosophical idealism.
The scientific revolution (17th century) should not be confused with positivism (19th century) or logical positivism (20th century). It is particularly ludicrous to discuss Cassirer's volumes on the Enlightenment as, somehow, opposed to science because they concluded with the observation: "one of the greatest achievements of the human mind [is] German idealism." (Bell, p. 28.)
Again: Rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz) is not "the same as" modern idealism (Kant, Hegel). Rationalism is a position in epistemology which may be aligned either with realism in its sophisticated forms or anti-realism in metaphysics. The same may be said of empiricism today because of our much more complex understanding of what is laughingly called "reality." Matter is now seen as "energy." Empiricism may be seen as more than compatible with -- even essential to -- what today is called "constructivism."
The conceptual landscape changed forever with the Kantian Critical Theory which is seen as the heart of the "German Enlightenment" linking the English-American intellectual revolutions in politics and law, industry and commerce with philosophical ideas as befits a "practical people" engaged in the important business of creating a global empire and running the world.
ALL forms of realism today or the so-called "new realism" or "speculative realism" or "object-oriented ontology" or "scientific realism" are "mediated" forms of realism as opposed to "naive realism" and are, therefore, directly derived from Kantian philosophy.
Thomas Jefferson is no less impressive than Immanuel Kant or Baruch Spinoza. The American Enlightenment "instantiates" and realizes the promise of European philosophers. This claim concerning the intellectual roots of the French and American Revolutions may be part of the argument offered by Professor Israel. If so, I concur.
II. Definitions and Distinctions Clarified.
Among the confusions in what purports to be Mr. Bell's review is the assumption that the history of ideas is the history of philosophy. This is not necessarily the case: The history of philosophy focuses on great names (Spinoza, Kant) and upon a highly technical academic subject called "philosophy." The history of ideas has to do with the dissemination and influence of ideas originally formulated in elite settings that are transported to the messy public square of politics and law.
Ideas belong to everyone. Ideas are not merely the property of esoteric philosophers. In fact, the most influential ideas tend to be popularizations or corruptions of profound philosophical speculations. Revolutions, for example, are the products of powerful ideas inspired by "felt necessities," as Marx said, after reading Rousseau:
"Obviously, the history of ideas, unlike the history of philosophy, tries to get beyond private into public thought, beyond the unique to idiosyncratic to shared ideas, to collective states of mind."
F.L. Baumer, Modern European Thought, pp. 6-11 (emphasis added).
Modernity (15th to 17th century) is the movement that rejects Medieval Aristoteleanism, centralized hierarchical power in religious institutions, a landed aristocracy or feudalism, in favor of secularized reason or what Spinoza's system describes as "the intellectual love of God."
Reason replaces God in the history of authority which culminates with the Enlightenment (18th century) in the writings of Immanuel Kant and the English, American and French philosophers of liberty. Reason and what is still our orderly universe may be part of what is meant by "God," say religious persons of the Romantic generation. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" and "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
The various philosophical and political movements at the end of the eighteenth century were united by a demand for individual rather than collective reason on behalf of an abstraction called: "humanity." This demand for the dignity of persons was crystalized in the American and French revolutions enshrining of the "rights" of wealthy white men and (eventually) of women and all others. ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft" and "Master and Commander.")
Marx saw these bourgeois revolutions as requiring the correctives of social justice reforms. A corrective that was anticipated by the American framers whose balancing of liberty with "happiness" (Declaration of Independence) or equality (Bill of Rights) obviated the need for proletarian revolutions if not for a civil war to end slavery. ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?" and "John Rawls and Justice.")
Crucial distinctions and conceptual clarifications elude this reviewer, as I say -- who is clearly not Mr. Bell -- as he/she stumbles by identifying the rationalism and modern project of Spinoza with radical materialism or the scientific materialism (August Compte) of a much later positivism.
III. What is Enlightenment?
Sapere Aude ("Dare to use your own reason!") is Kant's summary of the Enlightenment.
No authority except that of the individual intellect in the Protestant tradition, especially, commands respect. Hence, the First Amendment of the United States Constitution ensures that matters of conscience for each person are not the province of the government. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
This slogan means that the individual's right to think freely -- especially about political matters -- cannot be altered by the state which recognizes, but does not confer rights, as Mr. Jefferson explained with greater eloquence than any writer that I know of anywhere in the world. It is "nature [secular] and nature's God [religious]" alone in the American realization of the Enlightenment that confers "rights" upon persons.
That's what I call a radical or revolutionary idea.
Rights are humanity's ontological endowment or what it means to be a person. To be a person, in the American understanding of the word, means to claim the status of a subject in a world of objects. ("A Doll's Aria" and "Magician's Choice.")
A person has a material body, but is also a locus of rights and responsibilities by nature, as a matter of natural law, and therefore may not be deprived of those rights by anyone, not by any king or Pope, not by a legislature or judge, not by any group of rich men, nor by thugs from Miami or Union City. (Compare "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me'" with "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
It follows from this logic that no person can be a slave. Just government is the rule of law and not of individuals. Mr. Jefferson got more than he bargained for: "We have the wolf" -- slavery -- "by the ears!"
The trouble is that reason has proven to be a blunt instrument. Reason certainly led to science's achievements (antibiotics) but also to science's disasters (Auschwitz, Hiroshima).
We want the bonus without the onus. We want reason without the deformations of reason in dehumanization, mechanization, bureaucratic law, and/or the coldness of instrumental reason in the ethical realm.
The exclusion of all values from the province of reason (fact/value) has deprived us, pointlessly, of intellectual resources against the enemies of humanity, men drawing on science's neutrality in a hideous twentieth-century project of enslavement and barbarism that none of the philosophers of "progress through Enlightenment" could have imagined.
Nazi concentration camps as well as all similar movements and places, including every form of behaviorist conditioning and torture, used by anyone, to deprive persons of autonomy and other fundamental rights constitutes a betrayal of the humanism of the Enlightenment and America's Constitution. ("America's Holocaust" and "Give Us Free!")
The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment insists that reason -- as understood by the Enlightenment -- must be supplemented with love or the altruistic emotions that Kant identifies with aesthetic faculties in The Critique of Judgment. (Also known as "The Critique of Judgement" for our British friends.)
For if Kant is the philosopher of reason, he is also and no less the philosopher of the wisdom of aesthetic feeling and religious insight in his final works.
Kant is indeed the source for the idealists, but also for the positivists as he provides one inspiration for the physics revolution that culminates his work in the intellectual life of our civilization.
With all due respect to Professor Israel -- if this is indeed his view -- it is not Spinoza, but Immanuel Kant who must be credited with ushering in our "Age of Reason and Enlightenment."
Whoever is responsible for this review owes an apology to Professor Israel and to readers of TNR.
