Enlightenment Ambivalence

It was a little bit odd for two people whose tastes in philosophy are such that they find abhorrent anything hinting at, let alone reeking of, valorizations of “the Temple of Reason” or “the sublime” or “the beauty of Law” would wish to begin a blog under a banner of “Enlightenment.” We’re both Nietzscheans, (or part of the legacy of Nietzsche’s French Legacy) for crissakes! It has never been at all clear why we would wish to frame our blog discussion and collaboration in terms of “the Enlightenment,” and so it has often seemed to me as if our return to an “Enlightenment” framework was an act of cowering, a failure of the nerves, or even perhaps some sort of conservative reaction (in the bad sense of the word,) to the shock of the conservatism (and liberalism) of our time going further insane than they already had been.

It was fine for Foucault to declare that one must not allow oneself to be emotionally blackmailed into being either “for” or “against” the Enlightenment; yet does not the very word “Enlightenment” not contain within itself its own “being for itself” which makes it impossible to invoke the Enlightenment in some positive sense without declaring oneself, without saying a word, “for” the Enlightenment. And does the Enlightenment not retain some elitist connotation which makes taking up the theme of “Enlightenment” become itself an elitist activity? These things have also bothered me. Even if we have attempted to efface these aspects of the “Enlightenment” theme, isn’t it now obvious that we really cannot do so? Marching under a banner of “Enlightenment,” we must suffer some identification with the reactionary, the ethnocentric, and the elitist. Bummer.

I have tried to find some element or elements within the “Enlightenment” tradition which I can affirm, which I can possibly take up and modify and make work and function for and within the desiring machines or agencements or concepts I wish to plug into or create. I have been content to choose something called “autonomy” as the element I will focus upon and which will answer for me the question of what is Enlightenment in the present, as part of what we are in the present. However, I wonder whether, simply by using this old word, I am unwittingly making commitments I would wittingly not wish to make. Am I, in wanting a constitution of the self as autonomous subject, inadvertently asking and planning an intensification of the isolation, atomization, and narcissism which seem to be part of the consequences of “autonomy”, at least insofar as autonomy was projected by the “Enlightenment” thinkers?

And yet…

I won’t let any discomfort get to me. I will not be dissuaded. I think I can remain a “Nietzschean” and continue to work within this “ Enlightenment Underground” framework which Dr. Spinoza has devised. I find that a Nietzschean DOES have a way of looking at a “ Temple of Reason” without revulsion. While I will be unable to hold to the doctrines of “ rationalism” as these are portrayed and understood by the Enlightenment thinkers, it is important to note what I want to do isn’t to be taken as irrationalism. While the concept of “autonomy” I am trying to pick up and use was shaped by the Enlightenment thinkers, “autonomy” as it will be repeated here will be something different.

Revisiting Some Abandoned Questions

Just a little over a year ago, on February 16, 2006, Dr. Spinoza proposed the following initiatory questions :

-what was the Enlightenment?

-what was the Counter-Enlightenment?

-what is “the dialectic of Enlightenment”?

-why is the Enlightenment currently under attack?

-why did the Left abandon its traditional defense of Enlightenment principles and ideals?

Except for a very few, brief, almost furtive attempts made during the first month of the blog, these questions have received no attention – they’ve been abandoned.

I wonder why this is.

Do we need to give some account of the Enlightenment, how we view it, and how we situate ourselves with regard to it, as citizens of a western democracy and as bloggers writing under the banner of “The Enlightenment Underground,” or are we excused from taking it seriously – are we excused from this tradition?

I think that we must provide a better idea of why we wanted to take up this theme of Enlightenment – even if our account of that is never very fulfilling or far reaching…. We need to say why we thought the Enlightenment theme was important in the first place.

I want to re-initiate work on these initiatory questions of Dr. Spinoza.

Of the five questions, the last three seem to be secondary…to have derived from the first two, but not in some straightforward or unbiased way. It seems to me that they only come up if the first two questions are answered in a certain way, but not the way I would answer those first two questions. Therefore, I am going to bracket these last three questions and hold off yet further on them. Maybe I will come back to them… It will depend on the direction our discussion of the first two questions takes us.

Even though I plan to give a short answer to the second question, it bothers me for reasons I explained a little bit last week.

Which brings me to the first question: “what was the Enlightenment?”

I want to point out something I’ve noticed about the form Dr. Spinoza has given this question: he has placed it in the past tense. He has not asked: “what is the Enlightenment?”, but “what was the Enlightenment?” This is important, I think. Both Kant, in his essay “Was ist Aufklarung?”, and Foucault, in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”,( which is an essay in part about Kant’s essay), use the present tense—they are asking a question about the present – their present.

I think we need to do the same.

We need to be asking: what is the Enlightenment?

If we cannot ask it this way, we need to find out how it is that the Enlightenment is no longer a part of the present. We need to get a better grip on how it is that Kant and Foucault include the Enlightenment in, as Foucault says, “the question of [their] own present,” a writing of “the ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves,” but our time is now so much different that we do not so include it – and what this difference is.

I very much love the succinct way Foucault summarized the extraordinarily potent themes of the Enlightenment which he felt were, or needed to be, active and activated in his time, ( our recent past.) I quoted Foucault's summary in last week’s post, but I give it again:

“I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation—one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject—is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.”- M. Foucault, essay: What is Enlightenment?

To highlight their thematic importance for my own questioning of my present, I will enumerate these three Enlightenment elements I identify in Foucault’s words:

1. To problematize man’s relation to the present;

2. To problematize man’s historical mode of being;

3. The constitution of the self as an autonomous subject.

Of these, I find the last to be of the most ringing importance.

I am answering the present tense question of “What is Enlightenment” by reactivating the philosophical ethos which contributes in our time to the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject.

The second question, “What was the Counter-Enlightenment?” (vis, “ what is the Counter-Enlightenment?”) I thus would answer: the Counter-Enlightenment is that which works to prevent the constitution of a self as an autonomous subject. However, please note – I do not believe that there exist Counter-Enlightenment projects, conspiracies, or groups, per se.

We can rephrase the other thematic question Dr. Spinoza posed a year ago, “Why do people desire their own repression?” by putting it this way: “Why don't people direct their efforts and desire toward the constitution of a self as an autonomous subject, but choose instead one that is non-autonomous?”

If I’ve been followed in all this, I think it is obvious that I’m putting enormous stress on the concept of “autonomy.” And that’s dangerous, I think, because I’m not even sure that “autonomy” exists, or if it does, that it has the desirability I’m now giving it. I want to study “autonomy” in much greater detail. In particular, I want to show what "autonomy" looks like within that thinking which is "a pragmatics of the multiple."

Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment: Multiplicity-Enlightenment

Dr. Spinoza initiated this blog with a comment which has troubled me very much.

In his very first post in the Enlightenment Underground, entitled Going Underground, he said,

“The resurgence of the Counter-Enlightenment, on many different fronts (some of which are even at war with one another), has pushed the Enlightenment into an apologetic and defensive mode. Here begins a new kind of resistance. ”

I took this statement to mean that Dr. Spinoza had been somehow intellectually and emotionally convinced into being FOR the ‘Enlightenment’ – and that the aim of this blog would be to counter the Counter-Enlightenment—to work to push the Enlightenment out of its “apologetic and defensive mode,” into an aggressive and offensive mode.

Dr. Spinoza isn’t a particularly aggressive or offending person, so I had my doubts just how deeply his commitment to being FOR the Enlightenment would go – he’s far more intellectually and emotionally convicted of an attitude of total neutrality to ever be a gung-ho advocate FOR “Enlightenment” or any other kind of thinking.

However this may be, of the stances we may assume toward the Enlightenment, there are many more than these three: ‘neutrality,’ and being FOR, or AGAINST.

As Foucault said,

“But that does not mean that one has to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment. It means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism ( this is considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality ( which may be seen once again as good or bad.) And we do not break free of this blackmail by introducing ‘dialectical’ nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there have been in the Enlightenment.” – M. Foucault, essay: What is Enlightenment

(NB: In this last sentence, Foucault distinguishes his thought of the Enlightenment from that of Adorno and Horkheimer as found in their The Dialectic of Enlightenment.)

However, it does not follow that in refusing everything that might present itself in the form of simplistic and authoritarian alternative of for or against, we adopt neutrality, for as Foucault goes on to say,

“I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation—one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject—is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.”- M. Foucault, essay: What is Enlightenment.

Such an attitude, such a philosophical ethos, such a reactivation, is not a way of being ‘neutral.’

What I want to show is that this attitude and philosophical ethos is a ‘pragmatics of the multiple’; that the REPETITION WITH DIFFERENCE of the Enlightenment is the repetition of the Enlightenment with the difference multiplicity-thinking renders to that older Enlightenment thinking heavily imbued, inflected and deflected by 'totalizing' and 'oppositionalizing' conceptual forces.