Enlightenment vs Romanticism

[heart]

The Enlightenment has had three great successes - the Abolition of Institutionalised Slavery by the House of Commons in 1833, the Emancipation of Women in the Twentieth Century and the enforcing of the laws against child sexual abuse today.

Always remembering the Enlightenment has its enemies - the Romantic Movement and the myth of the Noble Savage, the New Age Movement and MBTI, and Islam.

The Enlightenment has given us everything we value in the Modern World but at the cost of some stress which we try to relieve by turning back to the irrational.




Check it out dude:

The Beggar's Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals

David Stevenson

265pp, Tuckwell Press, £18.99

The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Rakes and Libertines in Eighteenth-century Europe by Geoffrey Ashe

"Ashe traces the influence of libertarian (He means here as in Libertine sexually) philosophies on the world of the Enlightenment, showing how they met the need for a secular morality at a time when Christianity faced the onslaught of rationalism and empiricism."


My point? There's no savior coming to our rescue, no one philosophy or political party or any mass movement that can become the pancea to cling except individuals standing up for what is right. Debauchery exists throughout all movements.

[Victor]

Check it out dude:

The Beggar's Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals

David Stevenson

265pp, Tuckwell Press, £18.99

I don't know why you bother arguing with me. I said the Enlightenment has only today enforced the laws against child sexual abuse, and only in the West.

I said nothing about eighteenth century Scotland.

Your continuing arguments against me make no sense unless they are motivated by personal animus.

If that is so, please stop harassing me

[heart]

I don't know why you bother arguing with me. I said the Enlightenment has only today enforced the laws against child sexual abuse, and only in the West.

I said nothing about eighteenth century Scotland.

Your continuing arguments against me make no sense unless they are motivated by personal animus.

If that is so, please stop harassing me

It is not harassing you to answer your posts on a message board. I have not insulted you personally, I have only addressed your words. You are totally in control of your online experience here. You may place me on ignore. But you aren't getting some kind of free pass on the ridiculous connections you make.

You assert that the roots of child abuse rest solely in the Romantic Age and that the roots of progress rest solely in the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment strong roots in 18th Century Scottland.

It is so hillarious that you have no problem reaching back to the 19th Century (and to Milton) to blame today's evils on but since I've mentioned some of the less than sparkling aspects of the 17th Century Enlightenment, oh suddenly the past is off limits, we're only speaking of the present time.

It's not the enlightenment nor the romantic age that brought the modern changes. It was the efforts of individuals in this time who took a stand for what is right.

[Victor]

It is not harassing you...

You can't stop.

[heart]

You can't stop.

Is this one of your get into your subconscious techniques? It isn't working. If I think you've said something that I disagree with, I am going to answer. You don't control the actions of other posters on message boards.

You can make a blog in the blog section that only the people whom you want to interact with can see it, but you cannot control who answers you here on the main board.

[Victor]

Is this one of your get into your subconscious techniques? It isn't working. If I think you've said something that I disagree with, I am going to answer. You don't control the actions of other posters on message boards.

You can make a blog in the blog section that only the people whom you want to interact with can see it, but you cannot control who answers you here on the main board.

And I can continue to ask you to please stop harassing me.

[heart]

And I can continue to ask you to please stop harassing me.

It isn't harassment. It wouldn't matter who posted such, I would answer. The Enlightenment and Romantic ages are examples of humanity swinging wildly between thought and feeling, trying to find the perfect answer in the extremes, when it is the very extremes that are most dangerous.

[PinkPiranha]

Ooooook. Enough. Everyone's got an opinion, and are free to express said opinion, but this is turning into a personal argument.

[heart]

What victor is ascribing to purely the Enlightenment is really something that came out of a mixture of the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening which was really an emotional/religious based reaction to the pure reason of the Enlightenment.

Methodists and Quakers as well as William Wilberforce, Hannah Moore who were Anglican evangelicals of the so-called "New Humanitarianism" movement probably had a lot more to do with turning attention on to child rights and making life better for children. This movement came out of the Romantic/Great Awakening type reaction to the Enlightenment. Legal reform and prison reform movements and the abolition movement came out of this as well. The Sunday School movement also came out of this was a precursor to universal public education for all.

[pure_mercury]

Politics and government = Enlightenment

Art and attitude = Romanticism

There. That was easy enough.

[Samuel De Mazarin]

I wish people would read some Foucault and realize that sweeping generalizations about how great the Enlightenment was are utterly reductive and unhelpful... I wish they would stop thinking so simplistically about it. Heart is making some very good points.

And anyway, if the Enlightenment was so wonderful, why did Imperialism and colonialism reach some of their most horrific apexes during and after?!? What about Enlightenment failed which brought about the Romanticist period?

[pure_mercury]

And anyway, if the Enlightenment was so wonderful, why did Imperialism and colonialism reach some of their most horrific apexes during and after?!? What about Enlightenment failed which brought about the Romanticist period?

The uptight, hidebound attitudes and persistent clericalism and monarchism, mostly.

[sassafrassquatch]

The Beggar's Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals

David Stevenson

265pp, Tuckwell Press, £18.99

The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Rakes and Libertines in Eighteenth-century Europe by Geoffrey Ashe

"Ashe traces the influence of libertarian (He means here as in Libertine sexually) philosophies on the world of the Enlightenment, showing how they met the need for a secular morality at a time when Christianity faced the onslaught of rationalism and empiricism."

My point? There's no savior coming to our rescue, no one philosophy or political party or any mass movement that can become the pancea to cling except individuals standing up for what is right. Debauchery exists throughout all movements.

What's wrong those clubs? They seem perfectly fine to me.

[Provoker]

I wish people would read some Foucault and realize that sweeping generalizations about how great the Enlightenment was are utterly reductive and unhelpful...
And anyway, if the Enlightenment was so wonderful, why did Imperialism and colonialism reach some of their most horrific apexes during and after?!??

Exactly. In "Dialectic of Enlightenment" Horkheimer and Adorno expose the flaws of the enlightenment. Specifically, how nazism and two world wars in what was a barbaric 20th century were products of enlightenment thinking. Science and method was used not only to control nature but to control people. Nazism can be linked to Darwinism and Hitler's concentration camps and systematic killing was all planned out scientifically. Enlightenment thinking is totalitarian in so far as it suggests that science, reason, and knowledge are only tools with instrumental value. It perverts the value of a thing in and of itself. Science can be used to kill people but is killing people good? Science can be used to make people live longer but is living longer better? The sheer instrumentalism of enlightenment thought distorts our perception that surrounds the bigger picture. Moreover, when instrumentalism begins to take on a life of its own it becomes a sort of religion and becomes a system that people believe in. Thus, it is not possible to entirely replace belief with knowledge - and Horkheimer and Adorno make this clear.

To understand the above in a nutshell, consider the following metaphor. When one looks at a Monet painting too close one will not see it for its full aesthetic beauty. Only by taking a step back and seeing the bigger picture will a higher level of aesthetic truth be gained. In short, enlightenment thinking seeks to look at everything under a microscope and often misses the bigger picture by doing so. But post-modernism recognizes the complexities and contradictions in modern thought and is in many ways a reaction to modernity. This is where the argument for post-modernism begins.

[lowtech redneck]

[QUOTE=Samuel De Mazarin;290538]
And anyway, if the Enlightenment was so wonderful, why did Imperialism and colonialism reach some of their most horrific apexes during and after?!? QUOTE]

Because the Enlightenment enabled the West to dramatically increase its economic wealth, military power, and social organization while societies that were previously more advanced stagnated. Think about it; someone born on 1 A.D. would have been able to adapt to the period right before the Enlightenment fairly easily, but someone born at the start of the Enlightenment would not be able to adapt to the world that the Enlightenment brought forth within a mere 300 years or so. The emphasis on reason often led to rationalizing barbaric behavoir, but the mere fact that they thought they had to justify things on an objective, empirical and universal basis opened the door to later societal reforms. Did you know, for instance, that economics was termed the "dismal science" because capitalist theory undermined the economic and social justification for African slavery? It was "dismal" because it implied that white Europeans and black Africans would respond the same way to economic forces. The Enlightenment is disproportionately responsible for everything that makes the modern world exponentally better than previous eras.

Romanticism, the great Awakenings, and similar movements have flourished alongside the Enlightenment and its consequences because science and the material world are simply not enough to make a species aware of its own mortality happy, and lacks the power to motivate many people to action. Also, the human being is inherently limited, and lacks the intellectual capacity (singularly or collectively) to know and assimilate all posible knowledge before making decisions. Evolution has therefore provided us with emotions that often function better than our reasoning capabilities regarding certain situations and circumstances. The back and forth between the Enlightenment and Romanticism is simply a process through which human beings have attempted to optimally balance the role of reason and emotion in society.

[kyuuei]

It's been very educational reading these posts.. so I suppose I will thank Victor for starting the thread in the first place! It would have been a shame to be reading arguments between two posters instead of different educations and backgrounds and history on this topic.

[heart]

It's been very educational reading these posts.. so I suppose I will thank Victor for starting the thread in the first place! It would have been a shame to be reading arguments between two posters instead of different educations and backgrounds and history on this topic.

It was a thread split. No one really started this thread. :D