Starts good. The idea that enlightenment is constructed later doesn't even surprise me too much. Cohesive political movements usually have some sort of geopolitical motivation behind them. And that element seems to be missing from the enlightenment. It seems weird to label long period of time just because there happened to be individual smart people thinking great ideas relatively separately. Socrates, Buddha and Confucius we're alive at the same time, yet we don't call that "age of philosophy".
>"unbearable whiteness of the Enlightenment"
This is weird. If you wish to strip history from it's later constructs, it's really weird you label something "too white". Smells like political agenda more than truth seeking. Colonialism and enlightenment happened at the same time. Was that really news to anybody?
This get's bit off topic. I'm ashamed to say, but I really don't understand this "accomplishment is too white" sentiment. If I try I get two alternatives:
A) Somebody is envious.
B) Somebody thinks pride is a sin, and the master race should purify itself from sin. To show the barbarians how much better the master race is. (Unconsciously of course but anyhow.)
Colonialism and enlightenment happened at the same time. Was that really news to anybody?
Only if you stop and think about it for a second: the use of "enlightenment" to refer to a set of ideas about freedom and liberty which were in practice only extended to white men. The only way to reconcile the "we the people" of the US constitution with the actual historical facts is to assume that the drafters meant that people == white men. Because the rights weren't extended equally to women, slaves, or Indians.
You've substituted "accomplishment" for "enlightenment", which isn't the same thing. The article refers to the Enlightenment in the context of its modern marketing campaign: why are people talking about the Enlightenment so much now? He postulates that this is in contrast to Islam, as part of current habit of painting the West as morally and racially superior to the people of the near East.
> "The apotheosis of this turn came in the early Twenty-First Century, when Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis identified “Enlightenment values” with the prosecution of the “Global War on Terror”. And so, it appeared, we came to bomb and torture in defence of the Enlightenment."
There's also an assault on the "Whig view of history", an old academic hobby horse; a reminder of the importance of the Haitian revolution; and a general call to seek out and include in the Enlightenment canon those who were an important influence on it but not white or European.
Yet you and the others presenting this argument conveniently forget that not all white men were free and privileged - and that these progressive thinkers of the day, naturally strived to free and uplift those that were closest to them and mostly visible to them.
Also you forget that not all people of colour were slaves and that not all slaves were of colour. You also ignore the fact that most slaves were bought and purchased by non whites.
Applying modern zeitgeist and morals to different historic periods is wrong at best.
Enlightenment ideals of liberty were not universally applied, but only to a limited in-group deemed worthy. That in-group was primarily wealthy white men and not all (hence the American States originally granting the vote to male property owners as well as adding race requirements), but that doesn't really change anything about the point of the article or the point of the person you're replying to, but rather illustrates it.
If you gave every 18th century American a vote there would be an official church in every state along with all the marginalization/oppression that brings along. Not extending the vote was part of the checks and balances negotiated as a result. Right or wrong it was a valid existential problem for a young democracy.
But you can't really have Enlightenment without at least some system of trade. From the Italians forward, they were parts of the same phenomenon. Colonial - Mercantilist - trade was consonant with governance at the time. I don't know of anyone prior to Adam Smith who wrote at length decrying it. And it's arguable that Orwell's "Burmese Days" was one of the first treatments of the psychological costs and moral problems of actual colonial subjugation.
The rest is just judging those in the past by modern standards. Still, finding sources outside the usual canon is of vital importance.
>You've substituted "accomplishment" for "enlightenment", which isn't the same thing.
No I haven't. I don't think enlightenment exists. I was also very aware that original U.S. constitution didn't regard Indians as human.
And I still think the author doesn't really present a good case.
He could have shown as why we currently need the concept of "enlightenment" for our current view of history. (Like why was GB able to beat china in first opium war with superior tech that all originated in China?) Then break that down, show what really happened and why. Then just point out that "hey, there is nothing inherently white about it." And that it's not really scripted course of action, but bunch of lucky accidents combined with favorable economic, political and cultural climate.
Instead we get: "this is too white. Enlightenment is fussy thing that none of you understands and I don't care to explain. But we should remember Haitian revolution!" What did anybody outside Haiti actually gain from Haitian revolution? What does that explain?
I think he has good hunch on what might be a big white lie. But goes nowhere with it.
PS. Politicians have always been able to twist history to justify their power-boners. If historians start to modify history to prevent this, then we have nothing trustworthy left.
>During this time, according to Jaspers' concept, new ways of thinking appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world in religion and philosophy, in a striking parallel development without any obvious direct cultural contact between all of the participating cultures of the Old World.
> ... and the master race should purify itself from sin. To show the barbarians how much better the master race is. (Unconsciously of course but anyhow.)
It's amusing to me that works of criticism like this are jam-packed with the same questionable labels that it seeks to debunk. German Jews, white Americans, Trancendentalists, Cold War liberalism, Anti-Communists, Marxists...
Who are these people? Why are these labels any less problematic that the label of "Enlightenment" assigned to a certain group of philosophers in the 18th century Europe?
Those labels are less problematic because they are much better defined (e.g., "German Jews" == persons who practice(s|d) Judaism in Germany), self-applied labels (e.g., anti-Communist), or a combination of both (Cold War liberalism).
The question of what counts as "Jewish" is, itself, incredibly complex. As for self-applied labels, what does that even mean? If you call yourself something once, are you that thing forever? Do you even know what it implies to call yourself "Anti-Communist"?
It could be that the rise of 'enlightenment' word occurences in the 1960s refers to the enlightenment as the Buddhists and Zen practitioners speak of it instead of the European context of the word. The rise would map with the counterculture movement of those times which we're still living in.
I thought this might be the case too, but the n-grams for "enlightenment", "Enlightenment", "the Enlightenment", and "The Enlightenment", etc. are all quite different. Lowercase "enlightenment" doesn't show the same pattern as capital-E or with the definite article.
>"unbearable whiteness of the Enlightenment"
This is weird. If you wish to strip history from it's later constructs, it's really weird you label something "too white". Smells like political agenda more than truth seeking. Colonialism and enlightenment happened at the same time. Was that really news to anybody?
This get's bit off topic. I'm ashamed to say, but I really don't understand this "accomplishment is too white" sentiment. If I try I get two alternatives:
A) Somebody is envious.
B) Somebody thinks pride is a sin, and the master race should purify itself from sin. To show the barbarians how much better the master race is. (Unconsciously of course but anyhow.)