Rethinking the Enlightenment: Between History, Philosophy, and Politics PDF
Preview Rethinking the Enlightenment: Between History, Philosophy, and Politics
i Rethinking the Enlightenment Rethinking the Enlightenment Between History, Philosophy, and Politics Edited by Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boucher, Geoff, 1967- editor. Title: Rethinking the Enlightenment : between history, philosophy, and politics / edited by Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017046705 (print) | LCCN 2017047834 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498558136 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498558129 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Enlightenment. Classification: LCC B802 (ebook) | LCC B802 .R48 2017 (print) | DDC 940.2/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046705 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 What Is It to Rethink the Enlightenment? 1 Henry Martyn Lloyd 2 Contemporary Political Theory as an Anti-Enlightenment Project 39 Dennis C. Rasmussen 3 What of All the Others? On Recovering the Enlightenment 61 Matthew Sharpe 4 What Sort of Question Was Kant Answering When He Answered the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?”? 89 James Schmidt 5 Catharine Macaulay as Critic of Hume 113 Karen Green 6 The Principled Enlightenment: Condillac, d’Alembert, and Principle Minimalism 131 Peter R. Anstey 7 Reason and Rationality within the “Enlightenment of Sensibility,” Or, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and French Philosophy’s First “Linguistic Turn” 151 Henry Martyn Lloyd 8 Knowing Otherwise: An Ethics of Feeling 177 Daniel Brewer v vi Contents 9 Emotional Enlightenment: Kant on Love and the Beautiful 199 Marguerite La Caze 10 A Road Not Taken: Critical Theory after Dialectic of Enlightenment 221 Geoff Boucher 11 The Enlightenment: A Signifier of “Western Values”? 247 Genevieve Lloyd Index 265 About the Editors and Contributors 269 Acknowledgments The genesis of this collection was a December 2015 conference organized by Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. We would like to thank the conference keynote speakers—Peter Anstey, Karen Green, Marguerite La Caze, Genevieve Lloyd, and Dennis Rasmussen—as well as the participants who made the event such a success. The conference was organized with the support of Deakin University’s European Philosophy and the History of Ideas Research Network, and the Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and Globalization. Thank you also to those who responded so warmly to our invitation to contribute papers and who were such a pleasure to work with: Daniel Brewer and James Schmidt. We would particularly like to acknowledge the work of Matthew Sharpe who, beyond doing so much to facilitate the 2015 conference, did a great deal to assist us in the preparation of this volume. Thank you to Cameron Bishop from Deakin University’s School of Com- munication and Creative Arts for the cover image “Enlightened Supplement” (Photograph, projection, and sump oil), which is a quotation of Jean-Baptiste Pigalle’s “Voltaire Nude” (1776). Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia. August 2017 vii Chapter 1 What Is It to Rethink the Enlightenment? Henry Martyn Lloyd Introductions to books on the Enlightenment exhibit a remarkable uniformity.1 All attest to the importance of the Enlightenment as the cornerstone, crucible, or laboratory of Western modernity: the Enlightenment “stands at the thresh- old of the modern age”;2 understanding it is essential if we are to make sense of ourselves and of our modern condition; its importance for modern Western intellectual and political cultures is perhaps rivaled only by the rise of Chris- tianity.3 Indeed, given colonialism and the continued post-colonial domi- nance of Western modernity in the current global political and economic order, the Enlightenment is an event of unparalleled global significance. The Enlightenment is omnipresent; for better or worse, it is always with us even as we try to escape it; “we are all children of the Enlightenment even when we attack it.”4 These introductions locate the Enlightenment temporally in something like the long eighteenth century. Or, moving quickly toward a thematic definition, they note that the Enlightenment began and ended in revolu- tion: it began somewhere in the middle of the seventeenth century with the early-modern Scientific Revolution and ended with the French Revolution. That is, the Enlightenment began in an epistemological and methodologi- cal transformation within natural philosophy and morphed into a social and political transformation. The combined and related effect of these revolu- tions radically transformed Europe and produced Western modernity. It is highly likely that these introductions will mention Kant’s famous essay “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” In doing this they will imply that the Kantian “synthesis” is the ne plus ultra of the Enlightenment. If Kant is not used in this way then it is likely that the French philosophes and the Encyclopédie will be used instead: the article “Philosophe” from the Encyclopédie has been marked as the conceptual starting point of Enlighten- ment studies.5 A pithy quote is likely—perhaps this one from Kant: 1
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