Recently I finish reading this book:
A Wicked Company, The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment, by Philipp Blom [Basic Books, New York, NY, 2010]
http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Company...9530868&sr=1-1
The book was immensely interesting and informative, well written, scholarly but not pedantic, and has nary a single illustration, picture, graph, or logarithm table. The author does have an agenda and probable bias as can be gleaned from the title. Whether his overall thesis is justified and his conclusions backed by evidence, I leave to any future readers of the book. My judgment will remain as mysterious as the sirens song. The main cast of wicked characters is: Diderot, Baron Holbach, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume and a few other lesser deities and hangers-on of the whole enlightenment movement.
Since I’m now plowing into a book about the artist Caravaggio, I wanted to take a brief timeout to give opportunity for discussion on some conclusions from the above book. To wit, from:
Epilogue: A Stolen Revolution (p 316-317).
“
While the moderate, deist Enlightenment became both a justification and a means of molding society into a machine geared towards productivity and control, the vision of the radicals among those who assembled at Holbach’s salon was very different. Because they lived in a time yoked under the often cruel authority of the church, strident, combative polemics dominated parts of their writings, but beyond the immediate political battle was another, kinder voice, encouraging all people to delight in life and demanding the right to live in dignity and freedom.
The friends around Holbach’s table had not invented these ideas. They had collected the lean tradition of Western freethinking, from Epicurus and Lucretius to Spinoza and Bayle, and had developed them. Arguments grew and intensified during their debates and found new ammunitions in scientific discoveries, making them stronger and better supported by observation than they had ever been before. The radical humanism emanating from their works was read and understood by a small band of exceptional minds, among them not only the poets Goethe (who loved Diderot but detested Holbach), Heinrich Heine, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, but also Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
With characteristic insight, Nietzsche intuited Diderot’s modernity when he wrote that Voltaire was “the last mind of the old France, Diderot the first of the new”……………
Sigmund Freud, whom the critic Peter Gray calls “the philosophes’ most distinguished disciple,” regarded it as his personal mission to destroy all illusions. He found the groundwork already laid by the critiques of Holbach and Hume. But it was Diderot whose exploration of the passions and of the irrational founts of personality had the deepest influence on him………...
A little over two centuries after Holbach’s salon closed its doors for the last time, we still face the choice among Rousseau’s cult of sentiment and secularized self-hatred, Voltaire’s worldly cynicism, and the ethics of Enlightened hedonism advocated at the rue Royale. Long banished to the margins of history by society unwilling to listen, its message was drowned out by other voices; works written by its proponents were first burned in public and then read only by a select few. The triumphal transfer of the bodies of Voltaire and Rousseau to the Panthéon set a symbolic seal on their victory over their philosophical adversaries in the public imagination.
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Below is a link to an article on the Enlightenment from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is a very worthwhile read, however long it may be, which serves as a guide through this most important philosophical era that still reverberates and permeates our own time.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/
The above can provide fodder for a very enlightening and lively discussion (I do not plan on participating, unless needed). Requirements are honesty and some knowledge of the group and movement under discussion. Trolls not welcome. Any post that mentions IQ will be deleted, period. My judgment is final and there is no recourse. Make an attempt to be intelligible and intelligent; agenda-driven political drivel and/or pontifications will mean banishment to the Politics Forum for all eternity.
There is an abundance of information to digest; regurgitate wisely and succinctly.
Begin—(but only if you must)
-Zeno
Last edited by Zeno; 10-25-2011 at 07:54 PM.
Reason: Typo