So what's your conclusion to the Enlightenment Movement?

>Heard the argument that it's less about those cultures being less environmentally destructive because of a superior relationship to nature, but rather about them lacking the power to inflict the same levels of destruction that are possible with modern technology.
Well that is absolutely true and has simply to do with scale.
>Also what do you think about the Dark Enlightenment?
The group I associate it with, I do not like. I do consider it worthwhile to ponder about.

>What do you think is the problem?
People abandoned reason.
I will never understand why in the hell Freud became so influential.

>People abandoned reason.
Not the user you replied to. But are you implying here that people used reason before or more so?
What makes you think so?

At the very least, they tried to. That is the whole point of Enlightenment. Or of Classical Philosophy.

>At the very least, they tried to.
It seems you are mainly talking of philosophers and to some lesser extent scientists, not people in general.

Yes, I'm talking about the intellectual elite. I have no idea what the others thought.

The enlightenment was a complete success. It was meant to allow the burgeoning bourgeois capitalist class to take power from the old aristocracy and it succeeded beyond all expectations.

Not they guy but I just thought it might be a little like how during the rennaisance everything medieval was dismissed on principle. I assume one could argue that given certain ideas regarding racial realism for instance were true that in some regards the 20s century was more rational than the 21st.

Not saying racism was good but that it was a conclusion that came from a real place that might be contradictory to idealized notions of general equality. Addressing the problem rationally rather than emotionally could lead to better schooling and more opportunities rather than petting heads and drawing expectations that can't be fulfilled. Or maybe only if certain minorties take part of the responsibility of their situation and try to understand the problem in a collaborate effort with the majority.

Personally I think we're less rational in the sense that the newer generations seem to value feelings more than facts and connect their personality to ideas that pander to their feeling of selfimportance, like being the world saviours who know better than everybody else, or other sentiments like the struggle of oppressor against the oppressed, even if reality is more complicated. See contradictionary things like demonstrating captialism while engaging in a superficial consume culture that relies on status symbols like Iphones.

>Yes, I'm talking about the intellectual elite.
I can see what you mean. There was a shift with postmodern philosophy. But I would say it lost in the end.

There are still some postmodern type intellectuals, I consider Zizek one, and talking of dark enlightenment, Nick Land one. But I see them as a minority.

If you talk of the intellectuals in the media, you know the opinion piece 'intellectuals'. Hmmmm, well.. A hit and miss, often pseudo-intellectual.

But just look at the popularity of Daniel Dennet and Dawkins, I think they are very wrong on many occasions, but at least they do take the scientific method by heart. They are your reason.

So I don't necessarily agree, when we talk of intellectuals.

Is the enlightenment supposed to be a permanent struggle or something that can be accomplished?

You have to understand there's one God and one reality. With countless ways to interpret that one reality. The reality we live in today,we created through our thoughts and actions. And the
Ruling elite had a lot to do with inflicting and influencing our reality. Blinded by greed they are with no regardless to Mother Nature. The natural order of life has taken a turn to stop these distructive ppl from killing our plant. There's now a shift happening in ppl consciousness and n the earth vibration. We're moving from the 3rd dimension to 4th D. The 4th dimision is the same place we in our dreams. Once our earth makes this shift all the evil and disruption to the natural order of things will be fixed and no longer be able to exist. Light always triumphs. Namaste

Not trying to be edgy but if there was a god like that he died during the industrial revolution. Reality is just chaos without objective purpose with flickers of order that happen randomly given enough time.

A few years ago, Larry Summers talked about an hypothesis (among various) on why men and women are represented differently on Mathematics. Basically, according to the hypothesis, the average intelligence is similar, but men had a higher variance.

He said this in a conference, for top scientists. How did they react?

>MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins ’64 said she felt physically ill as a result of listening to Summers’ speech at a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) luncheon, and she left the conference room half-way through the president’s remarks.

>Dark Enlightenment
You are better off tolerating mildly annoying tumblrinas than being King Chad's serf. The dark enlightenment is a fedora-tier meme that won't amount to anything besides being an embarrassment.

There was never an enlightenment. Only increasingly intricate justification for imperialist capitalism.

What you mean is that there's a dismissal of science because it conflicts with values? How is that different from the past?
Back in the day it was more about God, nowadays it is more about liberal values of equality.

And I hope you know there's also individuals who push the notions of inequality too far.

I've seen evolutionary psychology, a touchy subject because it can conflict with liberal values (of equality for example), being misused by those kind of people who push into the other extreme direction.

So what I see happening is one side dismissing evolutionary psychology as pseudoscience, and the other side appropriating it and turning it into a real pseudoscience.

But you are better off being King Chad's serf than the serf of very annoying tumblrinas.

Not talking about the dark enlightement in specific, but I believe for uneducated people will there won't be no alternative to educating themselves, because the establishment won't teach what threatens it's influence. So it's either selfhelp or no help at all. On the other hand we as society will run risk of repeating certain errors if the new "enlightenment" movement tends to just go a few steps back in the process that spawned today's problems.

In a sense Islam is like an anti-entlightenment movement that could grow because people were artificially kept stupid in order to be more easily controlled. That's the biggest fault of the establishment imho because keeping the enlightenment for yourself might lead to a violent backlash that's ultimately worse for everybody than a populace that's allowed to think for themselves.

>Back in the day it was more about God, nowadays it is more about liberal values of equality.
The Enlightenment was supposed to combat this. "The Age of Reason".

And it is not even about values, it is about "feelings". This research makes me few bad, so this research is bad.

If anything if you don't rule yourself you'll find one who does it for you.

Maybe the problem was wrongly attributed to god. I mean maybe religion is just what you're religious about rather than the content. I assume you can be religious everything in theory, as in faith towards the irrational.

I was trying to say that the actual problem of the more irrational religion never really was addressed and after we got rid of the devine (as a symptom rather than cause of the problem) religious tendencies remained dormant until ideologly made use of them.

>The Enlightenment was supposed to combat this. "The Age of Reason".
So you don't think there will almost always be a conflict between values and scientific reality? That is what I am arguing, to get back to John Gray, you are almost arguing that there was a time in which human's could overcome their emotions and be fully rational.

I hold the same view as John Gray, that humans cannot overcome there biases. I am not sure if John Gray agrees with this, but I personally think that the scientific method can somewhat prevent bias. But not with humans being more rational or having more reason.
>And it is not even about values, it is about "feelings". This research makes me few bad, so this research is bad.
Now you are almost arguing semantics. For the sake of discussion, can we agree that values and feelings have some considerable overlap?

>but I personally think that the scientific method can somewhat prevent bias. But not with humans being more rational or having more reason.

We can't overcome our feelings but we can compensate for it and limit the damage irrationality does. I think the fact that better educated societies are generally more pleasant to live in than the less educated societies. Unless you believe anarcho primitivism I guess.

>So you don't think there will almost always be a conflict between values and scientific reality? That is what I am arguing, to get back to John Gray, you are almost arguing that there was a time in which human's could overcome their emotions and be fully rational.

You don't need to be fully rational yourself, you need to place reason ahead.

>For the sake of discussion, can we agree that values and feelings have some considerable overlap?

No.

Yes.
Modern "progressivism" is a religion.

Technically there should be a balance between science and values. If we would follow the scientific method without morals or ethical considerations this would lead to all kinds of cruel experiments I'd say.

What is being argued is that the Enlightenment was focused on reason. Which, it was.
Mrs Nancy Hopkins and most of our academic elite are not focused on reason.

So, we can say that the Enlightenment values were abandoned by our elite.

>you need to place reason ahead.
That is vague. How do you do that?

The scientific method works because you can't deny overwhelming evidence. But I don't see how this could be applied to everyday life.

Many of "the age of reason" intellectuals had beliefs they thought were based on reason, but by accumulating evidence or falsification turned out to be wrong.

Take Descartes idea of animals as machines. It could be argued that it was by reason he came to that conclusion. I would argue it might as well have been a cultural bias. Whatever it was, the mechanistic view turned out wrong, so reason is not an adequate method alone.
>I think the fact that better educated societies are generally more pleasant to live in than the less educated societies.
But that might as well be due to liberal values, not reason.

Isn't science moving into that direction again? Thinking we're machines?

>That is vague. How do you do that?
By using logic and evidence.

>Many of "the age of reason" intellectuals had beliefs they thought were based on reason, but by accumulating evidence or falsification turned out to be wrong.
Proven wrong by logic and evidence, not by screaming feminists.

>Isn't science moving into that direction again? Thinking we're machines?
We are talking of linear systems (mechanistic) vs non-linear systems (organic).

A robot can be non-linear.

>By using logic and evidence.
You remain vague and haven't really answered my question.
I could have agreed somewhat if you said "be skeptical" but such a thing is likewise vague.

You do hold the belief that individuals can overcome their biases by mere mental power alone. This is where I agree with John Gray: such a thing is not possible.
>Proven wrong by logic and evidence, not by screaming feminists.
Your last sentence just goes to show that you can't even separate emotion from this very discussion. It wasn't necessary to add it for the sake of the discussion.

The Scottish Enlightenment worked just fine, being mostly concerned with real science and expanding knowledge of the natural world.

When French autists tried to apply these principles to human society and find a way they could rule it by "scientific" laws, like the laws of physics, everything went to shit, and totalitarianism, either fascist or communist, became inevitable. The best political development of the West during the Cold War was the growth of christian democracy, conservatism and even a "skeptic" liberalism (Isaiah Berlin, Alain Peyrefitte) that didn't had the hubris of XIXth century liberals and radicals.

Too bad now we have the old problem rising again, progressives and liberals who genuinely believe they have all the solutions for society's problems, and that if you disagree with them you are on the "wrong side of history" and must be punished. This will not end well.

>A robot can be non-linear.
Yes but you need to understand it from the time Descartes was in. In his world all machines were linear. That is my point.

>You remain vague and haven't really answered my question.
No, I have. You use logic and evidence to evaluate claims. You don't use a higher authority.

>Your last sentence just goes to show that you can't even separate emotion from this very discussion. It wasn't necessary to add it for the sake of the discussion.

Yes, it was. Lawrence Summer's claims were not confronted by logic and evidence, but by screaming feminists.

Sure, but technically he wasn't wrong. An isn't non-linearity just a collection of linear systems?

>Yes, it was. Lawrence Summer's claims were not confronted by logic and evidence, but by screaming feminists.
Ok fair enough, I thought you were speaking of feminists in general. Which seemed odd to bring up to.
>You use logic and evidence to evaluate claims.
Well, I am going for a walk. But I still think it is vague.

Because I hold the view that cognitive biases and socio-cultural biases (ideas, values, and so on) get in the way of logic and reason, and that only the scientific method can counter-act this.

I mean, it was I who could not separate my emotion from this post, by thinking of the Less Wrong community. They advocate that one can increase your rationality, which as I put forward I think is false and have agreed with John Gray. I almost wanted to rant about them to be honest, because they hold the opposite view.

>Sure, but technically he wasn't wrong. An isn't non-linearity just a collection of linear systems?
Please, start reading about complex systems science. Otherwise talking to you is pretty fruitless.

He was exactly technically wrong! You could argue he wasn't wrong in other ways, but technically is exactly what was wrong with it. Non-linear and linear systems behave differently, that's why.

> They advocate that one can increase your rationality, which as I put forward I think is false and have agreed with John Gray. I almost wanted to rant about them to be honest, because they hold the opposite view.

I think you can if you're able to stop identifying with your thoughts as much and start considering you yourself, as a shifting collection of thought patterns, just another thought. What makes rationality difficult is having a stake in the validity of your believes. If you value the ideal of truth more than whatever you believe to be true at moment I think it's easier to be rational. Essentially you must be able give up wrong believes.

Maybe I get this wrong but I suppose with non-linear you mean the outcome isn't pre determined?

Given that's true I would say non-linearity is just a cluster of linear processes where the nature of the information for instance decides about the path through the system.

Depends how you read it. I see it as an 18th century social movement that did wonders in terms of separation of church and state, wider access to education and moving away from monarchies which were the style at the time.

That's how i see it, and i see it as a resounding success that is now the platform from which all modern western society is now built.

In germany the serparation of church and state was never really completed. I would be actual french secularism that forbids religious displays like burkas in the public space. Or at least in schools etc.

saved

Dark Enlightenment is a really good card to pull in a political debate, literally none of the normies are prepared for the lines of attack it opens up.

But yes, "Enlightenment" era philosophy is mostly just proto-tipping and not being realistic about the nature of the human creature.

>Some cultures are less violent as others as example.

And you seem to fail in comprehending the post in which you replied to which stated

>there were causes and underlying reasons as to why it occurred.

What circumstances precipitated societies toward a such behaviours and attitudes and why do they persist.

Actual workers don't want that shit anymore than they want communism.

Forbidding religious displays in public isn't required to consider church and state separate.

The latter. The mistaken belief in the perfectibility of Man is the tragedy of the Enlightenment, in pursuit of such a noble goal countless millions have died.

>in pursuit of such a noble goal countless millions have died.
When was this?

Love the thought, quad bro.

The success of Trump implies that they want something, even if they aren't aware about what is exactly. The success of the alternative media suggests they think they're not being told the truth, which suggest there's a desire for the truth. Or maybe just for being told what they want to hear. This is debatable I guess.

He probably considers Marx a consequence of the enlightenment considering he was influenced by it's philosophy. Especially Hegel I think?

>Too bad now we have the old problem rising again, progressives and liberals who genuinely believe they have all the solutions for society's problems, and that if you disagree with them you are on the "wrong side of history" and must be punished. This will not end well.
there is no other thing left than liberals, precisely because these people try to turn, as a political system, what remains once you remove all the hyped, the gloss of ''improving the people (who is always right)'' , aka hedonism.
They will fail, partly because hedonists are eternally hungry for entertainment, and also because their institutionalization of hedonism requires explicit authority which does not jive with their idea of the old meme of ''the republic for the liberty for improving humanity (through and for the rationality, not the pleasure!)''. Plus Controlling pleasures is bound to fail, but more authority goes against the exploration of pleasures.

but I wonder what principles will be hyped by, and how much explicitly authoritative the next generations will be. People say the Sharia will come, or some light version of the sharia, but I do not think liberals will favor the loos of their liberties turned into hedonism for some dream of utter acceptance, of perfect destruction of selfishness through letting non westerners taking their political system.

Tumblrinas alone won't reduce us to serfdom, we would need an economic collapse, and I doubt they would be the ones who end up in charge.

There are lots of ways for people to educate themselves. They could go on google right now and figure out how to think critically, solve their psychological problems, accumulate relevant knowledge and vastly improve their lives. They don't because they have little motivation to and other memes are more tempting. People will spend hours jacking it to Sargon of Akkad, Stephen Molyneux, their favorite tumblr or whatever. Normies are more interested in their distractions. Dark enlightenment and other memes just muddy the water.

There is no benevolent dictator that can guide people on the right path, dictators only want to sow spooks. There are only individuals who genuinely care about the truth like Feynman.

>See, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something and therefore, I see how they get their information and I can't believe that they know it.

If you gave someone the authority to preach this and shove it down people's throats the message would quickly be corrupted by other interests. People would hear this quote, but they wouldn't take it to heart and apply it. The only way to find the truth and convince people of its importance is through free speech.

>favor the loos
the loss

>the republic for the liberty for improving humanity
Many liberals don't/never believed this and your whole post is little more than a caricature of liberalism.

it was a few centuries ago and it is still the rhetoric used by the europeans

I think material hedonism is just an intermediate step and ultimately, if driven far enough, will lead you to living an ordinary life. Eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, etc. If anything hedonism is an understanding of one's own nature and desires, leading either to self destruction or an epiphany about what's really important and how extremes tend to hurt you.

>>There is no benevolent dictator that can guide people on the right path, dictators only want to sow spooks. There are only individuals who genuinely care about the truth like Feynman.
Feynman was a hack and did not care much about truth, since he chose to keep his faith in scientific realism.

>it was a few centuries ago
No it wasn't. Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom by Jacob T Levy is a good overview of the subject since you seem to be ignorant of it. Authority: A Sociological History by Frank Furedi is also good because the author talks about how many liberals had negative views of humanity (the public is irrational and should be given as little power as possible, modern libertarianism drawing quite a bit from those statements).

The Enlightenment was a diverse intellectual movement that was more than just Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

I don't know much about the enlightenment but I remember how Kant defined it; as an escape from the invididual inability to think for yourself and it being more comfortable to have other think for you, who gladly take up the task. Priests, teachers, doctors, and so on.

I too believe that the modern liberals hold a negative view of humanity and believe the public to be stupid without the possibility of redemption and the need to guide them for their own benefit. Or whatever is considered beneficial by their superiors. That said it seem that those liberals basically represent what Kant warned about and urged the reader to emancipate from.

Not sure if I misunderstood that part but I also believe to remember that Kant also argued those people are deluded because keeping the public stupid will sooner or later turn on them. I would say this makes sense if you consider events like the burning of the great library of Alexandria and smiliar events.

It is to Yuropoors because they can't do anything in moderation

Starting with the Liberals and continuing to the present day.

>and it being more comfortable to have other think for you

Fuck, I meant it in context of the enlightenment being an escape from intellectual lazyness which would result in being ruled by those who take up thinking for you.

>I too believe that the modern liberals hold a negative view of humanity and believe the public to be stupid without the possibility of redemption and the need to guide them for their own benefit.
They inherited that from those that came before them. The problem with talking about the Enlightenment or any other intellectual movement is people tend to take the "they dropped from the sky" approach when talking about such individuals failing to explore how they were affected by other ideas or events from their time.

He wasn't right about everything.

Concerning his work on the Manhattan project, where the scope of science was intended, he learned many important lessons.

This is the pinnacle of the work of the liberals/libertarians/secular humanists.

I always found strange that there are 30 articles in their little work, and only one article is about their conception of ''property'', the rest is about their conception of ''freedom''.
They also have bizarre justifications for their articles, but of course, they do not put their justifications in their works.

Oddly enough, freedom is what they take away first, once they think you act against their rules, but property remains intact until they see you as pure scum.
For instance, if they remove a few of ''your freedoms'' and put you in their prison, you can keep what they see as your properties (legally obtained, before the act that you did and that they judged as crime) while you are in their prisons (to manage them and benefit form them).

By the way, a few secular humanists wish to make the ''rich'' pay for their cells (meaning deprive the ''rich'' of legally obtained properties to pay for the cell). it is not a trendy idea today, and will never ever become trendy, precisely because property is the most important concept for liberals/libertarians/secular humanists. This is why they hardly define it. They are fucked today with Uber and internet, and some liberals/libertarians/secular humanists from the middle class dream of nuances about property, but they always failed so far.

Reminder that plenty of men in the middle class think that ''Landing on the Moon'' was the best ''adventure and achievement of mankind''

>Enlightenment
Wrecked by Stirner.
Replaced by Nietzsche.

>From the Declaration of Independence of a future Human nation:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all lifeforms are created unequal, that they have no rights whatsoever apart from those that the ruling caste deems expedient to endow them with at any given time, and that Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are not ideals to be placed over free men but mirages with which to confuse the weak minds of slaves and lead them to their holding cells".

I'm back.
There is more to it. Wholes cannot be reduced to parts. Sensitivity to changes. Just sheer complexity. And so on.
But I just don't see a scientific basis for increased rationality. While the notion of cognitive biases does come from science and which I base my view on.

I suppose it is hypothetically possible that one individual can achieve some peak rational thought. If we look at what Daniel Kahneman has to say, that would be our slow thinking system. But to conclude that one can somehow always perform this slow and rational system does not seem - guess what - logical to me.

The notion that one can acquire full logic and reason seem to be more theological as scientific.

Also reason and logic isn't enough, to get back to complexity, some things are so complex that evidence and logic are not enough.

>Sensitivity to changes.
It should say some changes, really.

>And you seem to fail in comprehending the post in which you replied to which stated
Maybe, sometimes I read too fast. I was not so much replying to that post as just replying to discuss Jacques Rousseau. Which I thought was behind the Noble Savage stuff, but that seems to be wrong actually.

I meant to say that there's a part of our culture that beliefs human's nature is inherently good and that it is culture that is to blame for man's ills.

And that the opposite extreme is that of the view that these ills are just human's nature.

So here:
>there were causes and underlying reasons as to why it occurred.
I would say the reason for the Holocaust are both because of Nazi culture but also due to human nature (for one, by making that culture possible, which really should be obvious).

I hold the view of John Gray, that some ills are indeed 'hard-wired' in our nature, such as the capabilities for violence and environmental destruction.

I say capabilities, because I do hold the view that it is the culture that expresses them. I view them as innate, but it is the social system that will determine their scale, intensity and the way they are 'expressed' (for lack of a better word).

I might be dodging your reply here, like I did before in that post you pointed out, but this is what I wanted to explain.

I am not sure if I agree with philosopher John Gray on this. I agree with him that these ills cannot be overcome, but that they can be managed somewhat. I do think, like John Gray, it is inevitable that environmental destruction, exploitation, violence and so on and so on, happen but that the system in place determines their intensity, form and scale.

So I do not fully agree with the enlightenment idea that human nature can be overcome, which includes the cognitive biases I've talked about in this topic.

>Even worse, from the perspective of the early Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, was the content of the naturalistic answers that science was giving in the eighteenth century. Science’s most successful models then were mechanistic and reductionistic.
>When applied to human beings, such models posed an obvious threat to the human spirit. What place is there for free will and passion, spontaneity and creativity if the world is governed by mechanism and logic, causality and necessity?
>And what about the value consequences? Reason is a faculty of the individual, and respect for reason and individualism had developed together during the Enlightenment. The individual is an end in himself, the Enlightenment thinkers taught, not a slave or servant of others. His happiness is his own to pursue, and by giving him the tools of education, science, and technology he can be set free to set his own goals and to chart his own course in life.
>But what happens, worried the early Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, to traditional values of community and sacrifice, of duty and connectedness, if individuals are encouraged to calculate rationally their own gain? Will not such rational individualism encourage cold-blooded, short-range, and grasping selfishness? Will it not encourage individuals to reject long-standing traditions and to sever communal ties, thus creating a non-society of isolated, rootless and restless atoms?

Isn't this an anticipation of our current circumstances to the letter?

>Isn't this an anticipation of our current circumstances to the letter?
Very spooky. What is also interesting is that:
>rational individualism
Is pretty much the model in economics, though it has been criticized much lately.

>Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault
Thanks for the book on my list to read user, sounds interesting.

>So what's your conclusion to the Enlightenment Movement?
it hasn't ended

>Seems like intellectual class has ultimately betrayed the ideals of the enlightenment by exploiting their position and now bends the truth in an attempt to mantain power, or rather keeping the underclass stupid.
morality is subjective. you not being aware of this is an example of the enlightenment movement still being underway.

>Or did the Enlightenment Movement fail completely, even in terms of the ruling elite? I mean in the sense that they start to believe their own bullshit.
the ruling elite are among the most intelligent and based people on the planet.

>Also what do you think about the Dark Enlightenment?
sounds spooky.

The French Revolution. It posited that a stable society could be created by wiping the slate clean culturally, socially and politically

>>So what's your conclusion to the Enlightenment Movement?
>it hasn't ended
it clearly ended politically and economically after WW2. There is now a consensus on what institutions to have to control the political and economic actors.

>muh holohoax

...