Philanthro
The enemy of Burckhardt is a sense of humanism which comes from the bourgeois. Rather he wants a kind of proto-enlightened humanism, which focuses on the violent and affective side of the human, not on the aesthetic.
”Burckhardt’s renaissance man was something quite different from the harmonious, classically gebildet individual idealised by Goethe and Schiller. According to Burckhardt, humanism played but a secondary, or indeed tertiary role in the making of modern subjectivity. Burckardt’s identification of the renaissance with the birth of a new autnomous personality, consequently, was both a contribution to the bourgeois religion of success and a forceful attack on the neo-humanist notions of selfhood so dear to the german-speaking Bildungsbürger. His idea of tyrannical self-fashioning, similarly, challenged the traditional liberal association of individualism and political participation, autonomy and security, self-cultivation and the private-sphere – just as his depiction of the despots as congenial patrons and catalysts of the renaissance artists called into quesiton the civic humanist association of ’liberty and letters’.
The Germans produce an image of the Greeks which is comparable to the idealisation of the renaissance man. Namely by forgetting all the dark sides of the individuals and the making of civilisation – and producing only beautiful images of people who fostered democracy, moral ideas and art. Forgetting the ruthless policy of slavery and domination of the Greeks, and the renaissance people as well.
Nietzsche shows that the German’s image of the Greeks is the same mistake as that of the renaissance. Nietzsche shows that Greek culture is not just motivated by the ideals of beauty and morality, but also by dark affective forces and egoistic interests in cultivating the self. Burckhardt and Nietzsche have comparable projects – showing that there is a kind of misreading of a certain cultural era. And that this misreading is structurally related to the misreading that the 19th century has of itself. In the foreward to Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that in these times, in which Prussia is winning against France in 1871, when Germany also thus becomes unified as a nation-state and an empire, he wants to talk about Germany. And he does it even better by talking about the Greeks and the way in which the Germans interpret the Greeks. We have to open our interpretation of the Greeks in order to realise the dark forces of the Greek culture, so that we can enrich our own dark violent forces in our own culture – to develop the German culture. We should not beauty-wash some other culture, but giving the culture’s evils a systematic analysis. Nietzsche and Burckhardt are fighting against German classicism, which is inspired by an image of ancient Greece.
Burckhardt is writing from Switzerland in which a rich person is someone who destined by God to be as such. Being rich was very positive and showing of societal success. He shows how one can actually become such a man of multiple success through more than just becoming rich: by killing everyone around you who dare challenge you.
Nietzsche was a young professor in Basel in 1869. Same as Burckhardt. He was a professor of philology; which was the master science. It was the most highly ranked type of scholar. German classicism was really strong, so to be a successful scientist you had to be a philologist, of which Nietzsche was among the best.
Die Philosophie in Bedrängnis. ”Everywhere sympmos of a dying off of education, of a complete extinction. That the educated classes are definitely in this movement is more and more clear to me. They are becoming more thoughless and loveless every day. Everything serves the coming barbarism, art as well as science – where shall we look? The great flood of barbarism is at the door.”
Burckhardt did not want to be with Nietzsche. He kindly responded to his invitations but always denied him. In Nietzsche instead there are a lot of direct traces to Burckhardt. The figure of Cezare is often appearing in him.
Both of them share the rejection of bourgeois society, of industrialisation, and prefer rather an aristocratic and anti-democracy. They are the reactionary right of their time.
Nietzsche says that universal education is a preliminary stage of communism: the precondition for communism.
To sum up, they were against everything that is part of the process of democratisation; they just loved aristocrats.
Burckhardt and Nietzsche’s interpretation of the renaissance implements sparks of anti-humanism in a new understanding of the subject. They wanted to promote the individual as an expression of violent egoistic forces. The most authentic mode of existence would be to express these forces as immediately as possible. Pico’s non-determined and self-fashioned man becomes the agent of a tyrannical and egoistic self-production. Pico says that man has no predetermined delimitation; what man should become then is a tyrannic and egoistic self.
They favour the singular over the universal, and egoism over altruism. In Burckhardt’s interpretation the universal man is a particularly strong singularity, and the multiplicity of his skills are the universal part in him.
What happened to the universal man in the enlightenment? And where do the Bildungsbürgertum come from and where does it go? What kind of cultural identity and cultural ideal do they involve?
Modernity (Neuzeit 1492-1700), whilst enlightenment is a social movement happening in modernity. It is not an epoche in and of itself. Humanism is related to both renaissance and enlightenment. Neohumanism refers more properly to the 19th century and educational reformers, which was a designation for a cultural movement. There are humanisms all the way from ancient greece, medieval humanism, renaissance humanism etc etc.
Historians also distinguish different eras of enlightenment. Early enlightenment is from Descartes-French absolutism. The early enlightenment carry most of the important texts. High enlightenment there are mainly French thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot & D’Alembert, Hume, Jefferson.
Then we have late enlightenment which focuses mainly on Germany with Kant, Fichte and Hegel. The French revolution is probably the beginning of the late enlightenment.
German idealism is between classicism, romanticism (Goethe and Schiller, Schelling) and enlightenment.
”In this respect, the desire for enlightenment may be understood as the desire for a reasonable independence (the independency of reason) in which thinking invokes neither foreign nor its own authority. Rather, it gains this independence in an effort tha ttis always understood and practicsed as a joint effort, in which methodical things stand at the beginning and only those propositions may be called results that can be accepted by all participants.
Auto-nomous is the capacity of reason to implement its own laws. Enlightenment gains this independence that is always understood as a joint collective effort in which methodical things stand at the beginning; and only that which can be accepted by all after repeated examination is presented as true. Since all have the same reason, they will come to the same conclusions. We can only know if there is a law to reason if we have subjected it to reality. We verify things methodologically, and this method is guided by the clarity and transparency of reason. All of these characteristics are part of the enlightenment, and the most important is the methodic, anonymous reason.
The inability of making use of our reason, which is everywhere around is, comes from the fact that we follow what others say – and this is self-inflicted. Everyone already has reason, but they don’t give themselves the chance to realise it. Everyone intrinsically has the capacity to us reason, it is non-historical condition of man. Accidentally there will be people who cannot, but essentially we always the potentiality to.
Reasonable independence = autonomy of reason.
Newton and Leibniz worked on the same issue in finding out the laws of the universe but carried out completely different collective efforts towards reaching that goal. This implies that we must all have the same reasonable condition.
Without invocation of authority of authority other than reason. Autonomous and critical examination of all claims and results. Interpersonal and transhistorical joint theoretical effort with a methodological foundation; reason has to be implemented everywhere to reach an always better condition for everyone.
I guess a lot of what I learn here does give me a wonderful picture of the stages of philosophy and its development.
Reason has to penetrate nature, has to enter all different segments of nature in order to understand it fully. These are not really metaphors, they are used explicity by scientists who represent nature as a female object which rationality must violently take advantage of. The pre-enlightenment nature was one with obscure forces, whilst the enlightenment brought the light over that obscurity and implementing order in it.
Reason tries to bring the chaos of nature into a more ordered form.
Before, people did not take into account to multiplicity of phenomena. Philosophy of enlightenment becomes a thinking beyond the system itself and a spirit of discovery which always engages in new theoretical horisons and fields of production. It constantly opens up new tasks and new challenges. It is the birth of a historical progress of mankind. Thinking man as standing in the process of a progressive unfolding towards no end. There is no end to it, everything can be understood better and more thoroughly.
”Perhaps no other century is so completely permeated by the idea of intellectual progress as that of the enlightenment. But we mistake the essence of this conception, if we understand it merely in a quantitative sense as an extension of knowledge indefinitely. A qualitative determination always accompanies quantitative expansion; and an increasingly pronounced return to the charateristic center of knowledge corresponds to the extension of inquiry beyond the periphery of knowledge.”
Each time thinkers found a new threshhold of knowledge, and found a new sphere of knowledge, they always asked themselves what knowing itself is. Each time we transgress this limit, we return to the center of knowledge: ourselves. We try to redefine the subejct that is engaged in the process of knowing and eventually transform ourselves.
The two sources of ’universal’ man. Reason and the mathematisation of nature and Man as the subject of natural law.
In these sources we find the birthplace of the humanist understanding of man. At least the kind of humanism that we find in enlightenment.
The idea of progress of enligthenment is that it is quantiatively understood. More knowledge. But also qualitatively When knowing and sciences reach new threshholds, the nature of knowledge itself changes. Reflexivity is implemented into the sciences in enlightenment. All great scientists at that time are great philosophers. This allows them to combine a philososophical thought on the knower with the discovery of new scientific paradigms. A quantitative expansion is coupled with a qualitative transformation. It changes the status of the knowing for itself. The kind of knowing that is construed in these meditations, is not the self of Burckhardt. It is a self governed by pure rationality, the self reduced to pure reason manifesting in itself. It is no longer the multiply capable self realising its own desires. The self of enligthenment is a kind of placeholder for reason itself. Reason is the singular protagonist of enlightenment. It is not just a history of different paradigms applied to actually existing objects; no these paradigms speak of themselves. We see in the enlightenment age a kind of feedback relationship between the way in which the object of understanding is understood and the way in which we understand ourselves as knowers through this. The birthplace of the universal place of enlightenment is the understanding of the mathematical object itself. Reason can only understand itself as such an abstract entity as that of mathematics. Behind the tendency to understand every occurence of nature as a possible manifestation of a formula, a calculus, of an ideal or a law or a paradigm, lies the general seperation between empiricity. The realm of the law, necesissity, possibility, etc. These kind of seperations are pervasive in enligthenment thought.
An important example of the progressional nature of reason is the encyclopedie. It is a book project set up by Diderot and D’Alembert of about 100 volumes.
”Indeed the prupose of an encyclopedia is to gather the scattered knowledge on the face of the earth; to expose its general system to the men with whom we live, nad to transmit it to the men whi will come after us, so that the labors of past centuries will not have been useless labors for the centuries to come; that our nephews, becoming more skilled, will at the same time become more virtuous and happier; and that we will not die without having deserved well of the human race.” Diderot on Encyclopedia in the Encyclopedie.
The human being is a historical being and the essence of that human being is reason. And if we gather all reasonable insights, we will improve the situation of humanity generality. We have to gather a whole lot of quantity of knowing, in order to provoke a qualitative change from that fact. Knowing is a path to becoming more virtuous. There is a feedback between moral excellency and scientific excellency. The more we know, the better we become in moral terms.
Idea of progress = trust and confidence in the future: based on reasons independence and autonomy in theory and praxis, future generations of mankind will have an always better life. Everything should become reasonable. Reason has to be imbue all corners of the universe. Reason is a process and reason is creative. There is a dynamism behind reason, it is not a static faculty. But it is a dynamic faculty, that is lifted to a higher potency in discovering something. Who is the agent of this historical progress? Reason itself, and man is nothing but the unknown X that tackles with reason. Reason is the historical entity that we are incumbent upon. If man is not reasonable we can forget talking about him generally. Man as the placeholder, as the incarnation of reason, is not an individual but the incarnation of an impersonal and collective force.
The whole of 18th century understands reason not as a static thing to defer to, but as a force that develops and which is only comprehensible in its agency and effects.
In the progress of the creation of reason, we grasp it. It guides our political and ethical comportment, but it can never be fully realised. Reason can only as a guiding and productive force, be grasped in its inspiration and its motivation.
Since 1600s, departure from aristotelianism in the natural sciences. Bacon implemented maths, advocated for an empirical science, for tests and questions that nature needs to respond to: experiments. The mathematisation as such however comes with Galilei. He conducted experiments, but also interprets the results by mathematical formulas, and overstepping the field of the empirical into calculus and formula. This means that we are not involved in a hermeneutics of the sciences when we interpreted the movements of things by the philosophy available (aristotelian physics), and as such a rejection of teleological method of Aristotle. Galilei says that we cannot just give words to natural phenomena, but rather the processes and the mathematical formula they can be described words. In the beginning of modernity we see a fundamental cultural revolution. Because what is far away from each other, the natural currents around us and the mathematical formula, suddenly are brought incredibly close.
The enlightenment is not just an episode within modern thought but is concerned with the natural mathematicsed insights of physics immediately.
Mathematical method in physics and astronomy is a proof for the independency of reason.
”Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and to read the characters in which it is written. T is written in the language of mathematcs, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
It is not that we interpret this book of nature by words, but by circles, formulas and shapes – the langage of nature itself. The nature of things is to be mathematical.
”I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies”. The purely geometrical method. The mode of procedure is pure deduction from first principles to their effects. The order and the conncetion of the ideas is the same order and connection of the things. It is no longer about interpretation, but about reading the essence of nature itself.
We don’t care what the things are in themselves, only how we understand them in reason. We have to transform them in order to know them. Everything that can be known, can be known by the mathematical method. Mathematical is that which Kant calls a priori and Descartes innate. It is what we get from pure introspection. In the Meno ”He is simply being reminded, and not taught, by questions only… he finds the knowledge within himself”. Mathemathical insights are distinct from empirical insights because the things that are thought do not exist. All knowledge of the world insofar as it is mathemtical, is knowledge of ourselves – obtained from the insides of ourselves.
For Descartes all knowledge are Inspectiomentes, cognition obtained inside the intellect. Kant believes in the interiority of the intellect into which we can enter wherein we find for example the marvelous world of mathematics. All true ideas for Descartes are innate and planted by God in our minds. Everything we know through mathematics is just the mirror of ourselves.
Nicholas of Cusa says that mathematics is the product of our own mind; yet thorugh it we attain to the knowledge of things.
Kants notion of the a priori is exactly the transcendental pure forms of concepts, like space and time, which is the structure in which nature takes place. Nature is nothing else than the particular forming of laws in the way mind projects upon it. Nature can only show itself insofar as it coheres a priori with our mind. The substance of nature, and the laws of it, are just versions of our innate concepts, and relationships between them.