The Enlightenment Hangover

“Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason.” - Blaise Pascal

Thermometers, fire extinguishers, and sextants are products of the Enlightenment period. Similarly, hot button issues such as our distrust in institutions, irreligiousity, and unduly emphasis on individualization have roots stretching back to these centuries long gone.

Our march into modernity was seeded with the Scientific Revolution and grown in fertile soil during the Enlightenment. Reverberations from epochs hundreds of years ago remain with us today. It’s a hangover.

“A madman is not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything but his reason”

-G. K. Chesterton

What happened?

On paper, the Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement circa the 17th and 18th centuries. Traditional doctrines such as the absolute authority held by monarchies and the Church’s centrality of knowledge were undermined. Individual happiness, constitutional government, the separation of church and state, and a reliance on reasoning were central doctrines.

While this period covered many different discipline, individualized reasoning was the headwater. The centrality of reason is evident in the Enlightenment also being referred to as the Age of Reason.

This was the supposed exit from the Dark Ages and entrance into a new, glorious light. Free of superstition, it served as the catalyst towards a godless world. Or so it seemed. Reason itself became a god, as man must always find something to worship.

“If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.” - Voltaire

It would be remiss not to mention the Scientific Revolution, which paved the way for the Enlightenment era. The precursor to modern science, it began with the Copernican Revolution¹ and ended with Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia.

Science itself, along with branches of science, emerged as an independent discipline with the rise of the scientific method and its emphasis on empirical knowledge. Fact-based reason and inquiry were applied to differing fields such as law, religion, economics, and politics. This movement undergirded individualism, with scientists empowered to discern truth through reasoning instead of relying on instilled authority.

We owe much to the Enlightenment. Opposition to absolute political power, the separation of powers, individual rights, equality, and free-market capitalism are tenets we continue practicing today.

History often behaves like a pendulum. So it is no wonder the Romanticism period followed an era where happiness and abstract reason were celebrated.

The hangover:

When the logical is taken to extremes, it becomes illogical. If pleasure becomes the end all, be all, is it no wonder one result is the infamous Marquis de Sade (from which the word “sadism” is derived).

How is pleasure tied to an intellectual movement occurring centuries ago? Hedonism is predicated on defining human nature in terms of natural influences, leaving no room for the sacred. If all that exists is the physical, it becomes easy for people to twist morality into nothing more than the maximization of physical pleasure.

An important learning is anything taken independent of context is erroneous. Whereas before the Enlightenment we had too much power in too few hands, now we are dealing with a complete distrust of institutions (when its views differ from our own in-group’s).

“the price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content for the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent” - Alasdair MacIntyre

This newfound emphasis on the physical above all - materialism - saw a resurgence during this period with philosophers Thomas Hobbes and yes, even “I think, therefore I am,” Rene Descartes.

In a nutshell, materialism denies the existence of the non-physical. Reality can only be explained through matter (i.e. any physical substance with mass). Our ideas, our consciousness, are merely the material interactions of physical and chemical processes. In other words, if it isn’t matter, it don’t matter.

This would mean, if we knew of every neuron in our brain and how all their interactions, we could figure out the science behind qualia (i.e. a subjective, conscious experience).² Using this premise, one could explain the taste of wine, love for a friend, or the perceived sensation of pain from a headache within an equation. The subjective is distilled into neat, computational form.

While Descartes was the proponent behind mind-body separation, he also advocated the view that animals are automata. Think of an automaton as a mechanical object. Again, it reduces living things to physical and chemical biological processes.³ Saying the human mind is a machine is another example.

French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie posited this exactly in his 1747 book, “Man a Machine”. He extended Descartes’ “animals are automatons” argument to mankind. Brains are merely computers.

Importantly, this philosophy is the foundation of modern science - the whole is merely the sum of its parts. People are nothing more than an accumulation of matter and their associated physical and chemical interactions. This leaves no room for Gestalt, wherein the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It also becomes quite difficult to adequately explain emergent phenomenon.

“For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” - J.B.S. Haldane

To be fair, science is slowly (and in many cases begrudgingly) moving away from a strict materialistic worldview. Arguably, it has to when faced time and again with its illogicality. For example, current scientific rationale comes up woefully short in explaining foundational mental phenomena like consciousness.

Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” posits that paradigm changes within science occurs across five phases. Paradigm shifts come about when it becomes impossible to ignore anomalies within the dominant viewpoint. We are in this “crisis period” as existing principles are re-evaluated to find a better explanation.

Summary:

The enlightened mistakenly thought they could escape past constraints by relying on individuals’ reasoning and jettisoning metaphysics, rituals, and religion. All that matters is matter. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.

In its place, science and reason became yet another religion. It’s easier to deny to oneself and others there is any religious aspect without a Supreme Being. What they are too blind to see is empirical reasoning is their god.

“In order to appeal to all classes and characters, Disbelief has in our time adopted a light, pleasant, frivolous style, with the aim of diverting the imagination, seducing the mind, and corrupting the heart. It puts on an air of profundity and sublimity and professes to rise to the first principles of knowledge so as to throw off a yoke it considers shameful to mankind and to the Deity itself.” - Christophe de Beaumont

Our world is wrongly viewed through a binary lens. There are many more “ands” than “either/ors”. Yet it nevertheless becomes a logical outcome when one source of knowing is placed on a pedestal. When the sole source of truth begins and ends with the tangible, no room is left for the intangible.

It is the stuff we can’t touch that makes life. Who can directly weigh out love? At best we observe love indirectly.

If we are told there’s only the tangible, that only what we can measure is real, is it any wonder our worth is concentrated on what we do, what groups we are part of, and our possessions? That society acts as if he who dies with the most toys wins?

Our limitations with respect to what is knowable by reasoning needs to be actively acknowledged. Like risk, humanity’s shortcomings cannot be eliminated. Mitigation is a solution: a knowledge that we are biased and at best see through the glass, darkly. ⁴

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” - Mark Twain

Many still refuse to believe that science and the non-empirical can co-exist. They can and they must. Co-existence does not mean complete reconciliation. There should be a healthy tension. The way forward is through the integration of seemingly disparate areas including science, reasoning, intuition, and the sacred. Thankfully, we are muddling our way through.

1. This revolution described the cosmos with the Sun at the center of the Solar System rather than the Earth.

2. Quale is the plural form of qualia

3. Materialism is closely linked to reductionism

4. Often, what appears to be diametrically opposite things is more likely a coincidence of opposites. At first blush, situations that appear to be opposites can be simultaneously true. When you’re running around an athletic track, as you move away from the starting point, at the same time you’re moving towards it.

Further, science often fails to acknowledge the pre-conceived biases of the scientist. They, no more than anyone else, are tabula rasas.