Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Context of the Enlightenment and the Contemporary Era

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-210
Author(s):  
Halina Walentowicz ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Human History ◽  
Human Element ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
The One ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Ethical Universalism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a special personage in the history of Enlightenment philosophy and European thought in general. This is so, because, on the one hand, he propounded ideas that were typical for the Enlightenment and greatly influenced his contemporaries—after all, it was he who inspired Kant with the idea of the autonomy of the will as a source of moral and juridical law, a conception which became the foundation of Kantian practical philosophy—but on the other criticised many popular ideas of his day, which from our contemporary perspective appear to have been the superstitions of the Enlightenment period. Rousseau rejected the uncritical apology of (universalistically understood) reason together with the “ethical universalism” professed by rationalists since Socrates. In his claim that human history ran in a circle (from nature in its primeval purity to nature as the expression of civilisational decay), he contested the Enlightenment’s widespread belief that it was a linear, continuous, cumulative and by nature unchangeably progressive process. Because of his transgression of the Enlightenment paradigm, Rousseau is sometimes considered to have been the first modern philosopher. And, in my opinion, rightly so, because his thought stood ahead of its time, and in many ways anticipated contemporary philosophy. I believe that especially the Frankfurt School owes a lot to his achievements. Rousseau’s thought already carried the main seeds of critical theory: the intertwinement of progress and regression over human history, emphasis on the mastering of nature and the destruction of the human element in the course of civilisational evolution, a social-historical (and not purely theoretical, as in Kant’s case) critique of reason for the sake of reason and not from the position of irrationality. Long before Max Horkheimer and his associates at the Institute of Social Research, and even ahead of Sigmund Freud, he saw reasons to ambivalently evaluate the results of human self-creation and to highlight the regressive tendencies present in human history.

Society, Nature, Emancipation

Why History? ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 154-190
Author(s):  
Donald Bloxham
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Vicarious Experience ◽  
Human History ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
History Of

This chapter is predominantly concerned with the thought tendencies grouped under the heading ‘the Enlightenment’, with regulation caveats about variations in character, national and otherwise, of the intellectual traditions denoted by the term: the French, Scottish, and German cases are each given separate attention. The governing concern is with the most theoretically self-conscious attempts to establish the utility of History as a way of understanding the human experience in light of influential concepts like Volksgeist, circonstance, esprit général, represéntations, and even ‘relations of production’, that elucidated human diversity across time and place. When explaining the broad sweep of human history providential accounts were replaced by secular ones, though in some instances the latter were structurally similar to the former and so had some of the character of History as Speculative Philosophy. On the whole the scholarship under examination evinced a liberal spirit as regards confessional and national differences, though it was frequently marked by a partiality to occidental civilization. Overall, we see a shift away from the study of religious and political institutions and towards—or back towards, insofar as there was some crossover with the French ‘new History’ of the sixteenth century—civic morals, culture, and the structural conditions of social life. History expanded further from being an instruction in statecraft for public men to proffering more rounded edification in the form of vicarious experience of different spheres of life.

Periodization

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigi Cajani
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World History ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Creation Myths ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Big Bang

This article presents an overview of the different periodizations of world history. It discusses first world histories that originated as part and parcel of religious visions which connect Creation myths and human history; Greek and Roman historiography; the Christian synthesis of salvation; medieval European historiography of the Six Ages and the Four Empires; Muslim historiography; the European discovery of new histories; the challenges against biblical chronology; Voltaire and the Enlightenment; German Aufklärung; Eurocentrism during the nineteenth century; Marxist historiography; UNESCO's world history after World War II; and current trends. The discussion ends with the big history, which places human history within the wider framework of the history of the universe, thus starting with the Big Bang and going through the formation of the galaxies, the solar system, planet Earth, and the geological eras until the evolution of human beings, and down to the present day.

scholarly journals The Great Battle of the Books between the Cultural Evolutionists and the Cultural Relativists: From the Beginning of Infinity to the End of History

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-30
Author(s):  
Kevin Fernlund ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Human History ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
End Of History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Francis Fukuyama ◽  
History Of ◽  
The End Of History

The idea that societies or cultures can evolve and, therefore, can be compared and graded has been central to modern history, in general, and to big history, in particular, which seeks to unite natural and human history; biology and culture. However, while extremely useful, this notion is not without significant moral and ethical challenges, which has been noted by scholars. This article is a short intellectual history of the idea of cultural evolution and its critics, the cultural relativists, from the Age of the Enlightenment, what David Deutsch called the “beginning of infinity,” to the neo-Hegelianism of Francis Fukuyama. The emphasis here is on Europe and the Americas and the argument is that the universal evolutionism of the Enlightenment ultimately prevailed over historical partic-ularism, as global disparities in social development, which were once profound, narrowed or even disappeared altogether.

scholarly journals Some Thoughts on the Role of the Critical Intellectual in Contemporary Germany

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
German Society ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Current Usage ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Professional Field ◽  
On Line ◽  
The One

The paper starts by relating the notion of the "critical intellectual" to the notion of "agent of social change" on the one hand, and to other potential types of agents of change on the other: women in revolt, artists, exiles and queer agencies. Proceeding to a brief characterisation of the socio-cultural and political context "Germany", we shall explore some meanings of attributes such as post-modern and consumer for contemporary German society and culture, arguing that these are cultural and economic terms, which denote current forms of expression for what continues to be a capitalist economy and a bourgeois democracy. One recurrent question will be what the contours might be of the figure of the "critical intellectual" under present day conditions. This is followed by a brief sketch of the meanings of "kritische(r) Intellektuelle(r)" in a historical ("geistesgeschichtlicher") perspective, mainly from the enlightenment onwards. We shall move on to a methodologically very different, but complementary, perspective, which is the consideration of current usage of the term with the help of large-scale electronic corpora of spoken language and an on-line search on the web. As we shall see, an important share and quality of the relevant meanings of a term lies in current usage, which may or may not be directly related to what we know from the history of ideas and/ or etymology. I shall then use examples from my own professional field of work for an exploration of what the role of a critical intellectual in a German context might be, discussing the field of natural language technologies. These examples will illustrate the fact that such a role has to involve participation in, rather than exclusively detached contemplation of, the sphere of production. They will also show that the role of the critical intellectual is, indeed, a locus of contestation in several respects. We finally broaden our perspective into a wider set of questions relating to the role of the critical intellectual, in German (and other) contexts. One of these questions will revolve around the notions of "values" and "ethics": Do we assume that the role of the critical intellectual is inherently connected to some systems of values, either in the sense of the enlightenment, and/or Marxism, and/or some other Weltanschauungs-system, or else do we believe that the position of a critical intellectual could be defined within some entirely market-driven ideology? Is there something like "truth", "progress" or "justice", other than what is successful on the market? Another one of these questions will focus on whether we can identify some force that motivates change in societies, and cultures, and what the role of the critical intellectual might be vis-à-vis such a force. One of our arguments here will be that among such forces may well be "contradictions", that this category of "contradiction" is in no way exhausted by the category of "difference" as currently debated. It will be argued, finally, that whereas the figure of the "critical intellectual", as we have tried to sketch it here, may be situated in a German context, its essential characteristics defy any attempts at claiming it for any one particular culture.

The Historic Origins of Liberalism

1954 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Religious Minority ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Religious Persecution ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Intellectual Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Historical Movement

The history of the secularization of modern culture has yet to be written, and the reasons for this are easy enough to understand. For on the one hand, the mind of the secularized majority has been so deeply affected by the process of secularization that it cannot view that process in an objective historical manner, while on the other, the religious minority has been forced into an attitude of negative opposition which is no less unfavorable to dispassionate study. Nevertheless, it is emphatically a problem which requires an historical approach. The process of secularization was a historical movement no less than the Reformation, a minority movement which was gradually transmitted to wider circles until it eventually won the key positions of social and intellectual influence through which it dominated European society. This movement, which was already known as the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and the accompanying ideology, which later acquired the name of Liberalism, have long been studied by historians chiefly in Germany and France, though in a somewhat piecemeal fashion; but their work has not hitherto been fully assimilated by educated opinion in England and America. Here the tendency has been to concentrate attention on political and economic change, and above all on the American and French revolutions. But we have not paid enough attention to the intellectual revolution that had already taken place before there was any question of a political one. Yet it is this intellectual revolution that is responsible for the secularization of Western culture. This intellectual movement, like most of the movements that have changed the world, was religious in origin, although it was anti-religious in its results. It owed its dynamism to the resistance of a religious minority and its diffusion to the illjudged and unjust, though sincere, action of religious orthodoxy. It is indeed, the supreme example in history of the way in which religious persecution and repression defeats its own object and serves the cause it is attempting to destroy.

Fichte’s Ethics on Radical Evil

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-164
Author(s):  
Andrey K. Sudakov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Real Sequence ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Radical Evil ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Chain ◽  
The One ◽  
Restraining Force

Fichte constructs the general part of his early ethics as a philosophy of concrete freedom in the shape of a history of moral self-consciousness, and in the course of this construction he discovers something what he, in Kantian stile, may call a “radical evil in human nature”, that is, a force of “inertness to reflection and to activity in accordance with such reflection” inherent to human nature. Schelling and some contemporary authors recognize in Fichte’s doctrine of evil a symptom of his return to the ethical naturalism of the Enlightenment. An anal­ysis of the dynamics of moral reflection in the I according to Fichte shows, however, that, exactly as the I itself is for Fichte essentially a duality, a subject-object, so is each particular position in the movement of the self-reflection of the I, on the one hand, conditioned by this spiritual inertness of human nature, but that same inertness is, on the other hand, a chain with which human free­dom retains itself, and therefore actually inexistent as a restraining force for a free I, conscious of his own ethical vocation, so that its dwelling within the limits of the customary (in the invariability of consciousness) is the subject’s own fault as “non-use of freedom”. The spiritual inertness, as an empirical con­dition of possibility of a bad choice, is nevertheless in Fichte a spiritual force of a specific kind, active even there where ethical choice in the strict sense of the term is not (yet) at issue. Schelling’s reproof must therefore be acknowledged as invalid, exactly because the history of self-consciousness is, in Fichte’s ethics, not so much an exposition of a real sequence, as a transcendental reflec­tion of grounds.

Great projects and crude realities

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Ángel Giménez Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Universal Schooling

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the circumstances that have conditioned the development of education in Spain from the enlightenment to the present day. Design/methodology/approach – Multidisciplinary scientific approach that combines the interpretation of the legal texts with the revision of the doctrinal and theoretical contributions made on the issue. Findings – From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the history of education in Spain has been marked by constant fluctuations between the reactionary instincts, principally maintained by the Catholic Church and the conservative social classes, and the progressive experiments, driven by the enlightened and the liberals first, and the republicans and the socialists later. As a consequence of that, the fight for finishing with illiteracy and guaranteeing universal schooling underwent permanent advances and retreats, preventing from an effective modernization of the Spanish educative system. On the one hand, renewal projects promoted by teachers and pedagogues were inevitably criticized by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, obsessed with the idea of preserving the influence of religion on the schools. On the other hand, successive governments were weak in implementing an educational policy which could place Spain at the level of the other European and occidental nations. Originality/value – At the dawn of the twenty-first century, although the country has overcome a good part of its centuries-old backwardness, increasing economic difficulties and old ideological splits keep hampering the quality of teaching, gripped by neoliberal policies which undermine the right to education for all. The reading of this paper offers various historical clues to understand this process.

The Prophetic Word of God and History

1994 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-251
Author(s):  
Walter Brueggemann
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The One ◽  
Acts Of God

Presently, there are two views of human history vying for our allegiance. The one is grounded in the Enlightenment and insists that history is a closed process whose course is determined by the dictum that “might makes right.” The other view is that of supernaturalism, which regards every event in history as a direct act of God. Challenging both of these views is the prophetic construal of history. This construal dares to identify extraordinary human events—the promise of Isaac to Abraham and Sarah, the exodus, the pronouncements of Israel's great prophets, and the ministry of Jesus—as acts of God. Such extraordinary events have the power to free us to speak of God as enacting “newness” also in our time.

Book Rewiev: Kafanova, O.B. (2020) Perevody N.M. Karamzina kak Kul’turnyy Universum [Translations by N.M. Karamzin as a Cultural Universe]. Saint Petersburg: Aleteyya

2021 ◽  
pp. 164-170
Author(s):  
Natalia Ye. Nikonova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
French Literature ◽  
The Public ◽  
Saint Petersburg ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Unique Material ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Literary Classics

The review notes Olga Kafanova’s great contribution to the study of the history of Russian literature, and especially works by Nikolai Karamzin, and productivity of her research as evidenced by the presented monograph. The book excels in its fundamental nature, novelty and reliability of the source base (more than 500 items of the bibliography of translations by Karamzin (1783-1800) and originals discovered while studying foreign works and periodicals). The review indicates the novelty and prospects of a number of Kafanova’s observations. In 2016, the public celebrated the 250th anniversary of Karamzin’s birth. The jubilee events were held in several countries and brought together dozens of scholars. One of the particular results of these events is an observation on the need for a comprehensive understanding of the work of Karamzin as a translator at a new level. The reviewed monograph promptly fills the noted gap and, using unique material, solves the problem of popularizing and preserving the Russian literary classics. The bibliography presented in the form of an appendix contains names of more than 50 authors of English, German, and French literature, whose texts Karamzin referred to. Based on the compiled corpus, Kafanova chooses an analytical approach that consistently reflects the evolution of Karamzin’s own system of views, on the one hand, and is based on the classic examples of Russian literary criticism and translation studies, on the other. Kafanova’s genre-generic approach easily synthesizes the several dimensions of the literary, editorial and institutional activities of Karamzin as a translator; there is no criticism of the clear definitions that classify Karamzin’s work on mastering the texts of foreign authors to one type or another. Another idea in the book is connected with a fundamental approach in the science of literature, according to which the history of literary processes is considered as a series of successive trends and directions of humanitarian thought. The reviewed book tells about the nuances of the era of pre-Romanticism, about the intricacies of interpreting Stem’s “sentimental stories of a sensitive heroine”, about the “portrait” project associated with “sensitive authors” (Wieland, Gesner, Klopstock, and others), and about the peculiarities of the Enlightenment and European Antiquity in the pantheon of literature by Karamzin and his contemporaries.

Introduction

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umberto Albarella ◽  
Keith Dobney
Keyword(s):  
Wild Boar ◽  
International Workshop ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Human History ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Important Prey ◽  
Hunting And Gathering ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Relationship Of

In terms of human–animal relationships, pigs are perhaps one of the most iconic but also paradoxical domestic animals. On the one hand, they are praised for their fecundity, their intelligence, and their ability to eat almost anything, but on the other hand, they are unfairly derided for their apparent slovenliness, unclean ways, and gluttonous behaviour. In complete contrast, their ancestor (the wild boar) is perceived as a noble beast of the forest whose courage and ferocity has been famed and feared throughout human history. The relationship of wild boar and pig with humans has been a long and varied one. Archaeological evidence clearly shows that wild boar were important prey animals for early hunter-gatherers across wide areas of Eurasia for millennia. During the early Holocene, however, this simple predator–prey relation evolved into something much more complex as wild boar, along with several other mammal species, became key players in one of the most dramatic episodes in human history: the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, involving the domestication of plants and animals. From that moment, wild boar turned into pigs and became much more than mere components of human subsistence strategies. They were key entities in the complex cultural development of some human societies around the world and played an important role in the history of human dispersal. Interestingly, the consumption of pork also became (and still remains) perhaps the most celebrated, and widespread, case of dietary proscription. In terms of their relationships with humans, pigs are victims of their own success. Even more than wolves, they are highly adaptable and generalized omnivores, which means that they have a range of possible relationships with humans that is perhaps wider and more complex than for most other animal species. In fact, the biology and behaviour of pigs present a number of special challenges to their study, in addition to offering opportunities to further understand aspects of human history. The concept of this book grew out of an international workshop, entitled ‘Pigs and Humans’, held over the weekend of 26–28 September 2003, at Walworth Castle, County Durham, UK.

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