Two thoughts in particular emerged from the Enlightenment that shaped the
ideas of the 20th century.
The first is that science gives us a complete description of reality.
What can be known can be known by the scientific method.
The second is that we can formulate a comprehensive theory of ethics and
politics of what I as an individual ought to do and what we collectively
ought to do.


Baron Paul d'Holbach argued that science established materialism and
also atheism, that God does not exist.
If the world is nothing but a mass of molecules moving around according to
scientific laws, however, what sense can we make of norms, of values?
What sense is there in speaking of right and wrong, good and evil,
justice and injustice?
It would be like looking at the motions of the planets and
recommending or denouncing them.



Dare to know - englightenment motto pronounced by Immanuel Kant.
My personal englightenment from a rigid upbringing couldn't be described better.


Enlightenment thinkers differ in many respects.
They take varying stances on the nature versus nurture
question, for example.
Some are empiricists who think that all knowledge comes from experience.
Others are rationalists who think that some knowledge of the world is a
priori, independent of experience or innate.
Some believe in God, some don't.
But all accept four basic assumptions.
First, truth--
there are truths that are absolute, independent of any individual mind and
thus, universal.
Second, knowledge.
It's possible to have objective knowledge of some of those truths.
Third, reason.
Reason is the best way to achieve and justify such knowledge.
And fourth, progress.
Acting rationally in response to objective knowledge improves our
chances of achieving our aims.



Morals have an influence on actions and affections.
Reason alone can have no such influence.
So morality is not a conclusion of reason.
Notice the assumption.
Reason is inert.
It can't influence actions or affections, that is feelings.
Reason deals with facts.
But facts are what they are.
They don't and can't motivate anyone.

Morality, Hume concludes, consists of no matter of fact.
You should or you shouldn't.
Thou shalt or thou shalt not.
That's good or bad, just or unjust.
Those aren't matters of fact.
They're directed at action.
But facts--
it's warm today; 2 plus 2 is 4; force is mass times acceleration--
aren't directed at action.

Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.
Our feelings are particular.

I respond emotionally, passionately to particular actions and events.
I then generalize, holding that stealing is wrong, for example..
Our moral sense is the capacity we have for the feelings that constitute
the basis for our moral judgments.
Some people have a strong and well developed moral sense.
Others don't.
Some may even be morally blind.
The French Revolution would soon put the idea that reason should be the
slave of the passions to the test.
In nine months in 1792 in the Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety
executed 50,000 people.
They developed a new technology of mass murder using the guillotine and
in the chilling anticipation of the 20th century, even loading people onto
barges to be sunk in the middle of the river to kill people more quickly and
efficiently.
This was in part driven by political theory.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writings inspired the revolution, had asked,
what happens when an individual's will conflicts with the general will, the
common good of the community?
He answered that the general will must take precedence.
But he added that since an individual in the social contract commits himself
and everything he has to the community, yielding to the general
will isn't merely an obligation for the greater good.
It's an expression of his own freedom.
Those whose interests conflict with those of the state must be crushed for
their own good.
In his words, they must be forced to be free.
Madame de Stael, witnessing this, saw the end of the age of reason and
feared for what might come next.

Passions are immensely dangerous.
They must be controlled by reason, she urged, in individual
lives and in society.
The proper roles of reason and passion would remain at center stage
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Both, it turns out, would pose serious dangers.
Millions would die because of someone's theory.
Millions more would die because of someone's unbridled passion.
The Europe Madame de Stael knew would disappear, never to return.