Philosophy of the Enligthenment
- Book: Ernst Cassier. La philosophie des Lumieres.
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Summary
Based on the booknotes of Michel Bauwens, 2005:
Chapter 1
The 17th cy. was the century of systems: Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Spinoza. It was a whole system of deduction, starting from first principles, to build a self-enclosing total explanation.
In the 18th cy., this form of reason, or 'esprit de systeme', is abandoned for an 'esprit systematique', which starts by examining the phenomena, and tries to develop the principles behind them. It is an analytical method, which decomposes, then recomposes, in order to understand. Whereas the 17th cy desired a mathematical physics, and therefore almost elevated math to a new metaphysics, the 18th cy wanted a purely descriptive and empirical reality, no matter if it could also be described by beautiful mathematical formulas. Reality comes first!
Reason is no longer the discovery of 'innate ideas', common to all mankind and the divine, but it becomes the path of analysis-synthesis, a 'discovery'. Cassirer clearly shows that reason has a history! The 18th cy started to see everything as a physical reality that could be analyzed: the sensations from nature, mental events, and society. Everything is considered to exist from fundamental building blocks, which have to be discovered, their relations if possible explained through mathematics. The aim of the use of Reason, is to bring unity to the diversity of phenomena.
Chapter 2
The next chapter discusses physical-mathematical reasoning and explains how this means a new form of Truth is invented, one that is outside of Revelation, located in nature, and much more trustworthy because expressable in mathematics. Newton, following Galileo-Kepler, had gone beyond particular findings to discover the 'basic law of the cosmos'. A novelty of the 18th cy is that individual entities are now seen as independent, that they can affirm their singularity vis a vis the universal (Leibniz's monad). The Newtonian revolution meant, and this is why he was venerated during the Enlightenment, that physical reality now had a sound foundation; and was matched by humanity's capacity to know these natural laws.
The Enlightenment, according to Cassirer, is a further working out and solving of the problems posed by the pioneers of the Renaissance. The 18th cy overturns Cartesian physics and the system philosophies which start from general principles. Reason moves from rationalism to empiricism. The intellect is now focused on the relationships between things and phenomena, and explicitly refuses to venture into the essence of things. Thus, Cassirer, refutes that mechanism and materialism were central tenets because this would already be a metaphysical affirmation. A key problem was the 'uniformity of nature', which made it necessary to develop scientific hypotheses, but were themselves not provable. Thus the move to the scepticism of Hume, who divorced certainty from metaphysics, and made it immanent, i.e. a component of human nature.