A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual…

1/27/10: Spinoza sighting! Can't wait to get to this one.

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Awww. Look at little, sweet, innocent Esteban, circa early 2010 up there, back before he read this. The abbreviated anticipation is almost palpable.

What a chump.

Shitty books are shitty for different shitty reasons. This one is shitty because it deals foremost with philosophy. Philosophy. Meditate upon the word for a minute. Do you break out in a cold sweat at the thought of a bunch of white, twenty-something males that look like they just rolled out of bed lounging around coffee houses, reeking of stale cigarettes and bicycle grease and trying to impress each other in some indecipherable code? Who don't realize that they've peaked? That they have nothing to offer a society that has moved past them? Waaaaay past them? That's what the word philosophy conjures for me.

Because I think philosophy, as it's currently practiced, is nothing but word games and parlor tricks. A way for nerds to have ready-made pick-up lines because they can't think spontaneously. Sure, it meant something at one time. It pierced the veil of religio-monarchist oppression to a large degree and gave form and expression to both secular democracy and science, at least in the West, back in the 1700s during what we celebrate as the Enlightenment. But that's about the last time it had anything worthwhile to say, at least as far as I'm concerned.

But that's enough for me because I'm interested in history and curious about how we got where we are. Philosophy ushered in modernity. That's a pretty big deal. But, to be frank, the author is an awful writer. Aside from his penchant for quoting bygone philosophers in the original French and German without providing translations (fuck you, Jonathan I. Israel! The conclusion of modernity is 'Merica and we speak English in 'Merica! Why should I have to bother with Google translate, you conceited bastard? See what I mean about philosophers contentedly lounging about and talking only to themselves? Faugh!), he just tries to do too much in too few pages. This thing reads like bullet points interlaced with adjectives.

We, the inheritors and benefactors of the Enlightenment, deserve better from our philosophy. ( )

Jonathan Israel begins with an apparently simple question: Where do the values central to Western political culture—democracy, individual liberty, egalitarianism—come from? His answer, not so simply, is Philosophy.

Israel’s study in intellectual history and historiography makes clear that the usual representation of the European Enlightenment is incomplete. He demonstrates how the Enlightenment was driven by a debate between two incompatible projects of political, social and moral reform. While the Moderate Enlightenment attempted to reconcile empiricism with tradition and refused ultimately to repudiate the monarchical-aristocratic order of society, it was the Radical Enlightenment that portrayed society as it had evolved as inherently defective, oppressive and systematically unjust, and hence wrongly organized for the purpose of human happiness. For the Radicals, enlightenment was not knowledge of abstract, speculative, or theoretical sciences, but ‘understanding,’ and in particular an understanding of how privilege, vast inequalities of wealth and status, and the prevalence of aristocracy and ecclesiastical authority were anathema to freedom. Israel’s review of the arguments is succinct but thorough (he provides a grander exegesis in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750).

The mistake in the historiography, according to Israel, has been to assume that a dramatic transformation of conditions and/or powerful social forces drove developments in the West. Too often neglected has been the gradual “revolution of the mind,” generated by thinkers and writers during the 1770s and 1780s, which laid the groundwork for the evolution toward liberty and democracy during the 19th century. Ideas have consequences, writes Israel, and the real work was accomplished not by the usual suspects (Locke, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc) but by the likes of Bayle, Diderot, Helvétius, d’Holbach, Paine and others, who were responsible for the critical shift in perceptions, concepts, and attitudes. The giant upon whose shoulders the others stood was Spinoza, and the wellspring of Western political culture was the first Dutch republic, not ancient Greece. (Stephen Nadler's Spinoza: A Life is an excellent treatment of the social, cultural, and political milieu within which Spinoza moved.)

What distinguishes the political culture of the West from the rest? In one key sense it has been the formulation of a conception of liberty rooted in a secular moral system that recognizes the interests of the individual as a member of society. In A Revolution of the Mind, Jonathan Israel explains the origins of that conception of liberty.