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Originally Posted by roachboy
idyllic...you can believe whatever you like. it's fine. this is a debate.
but i don't think you know what the enlighenment was beyond a wikipedia level. for example, there's a long debate about how to position the french revolution with respect to it. if you position the french revolution as coming out of enlightenment ideas---even as there is a real problem with this notion of the enlightenment being one thing, such that some fine morning in the early 18th century a couple dudes in scotland woke up thinking "you know, maybe there is no need for this god character to explain natural phenomena" and suddenly everything changed, a kind of mobile facepalm moment having been set abroad in the land---anyway, if you position the french revolution as an expression of enlightenment ideas, then you have to put the american revolution in line with all of them and not make some silly distinction between what thinkin fellers like voltaire said (dont get me wrong, i like voltaire) and what "men of action" like jefferson said or did. the american revolution was both a cause (in triggering the bond default that triggered the aristocratic revolt that set things into motion in 1787) and an inspiration (for things like the revolutionaries themselves, for the declaration of the rights of man, for the way they proceeded)....
which means that you cannot simply erase jefferson.
and you really cannot erase him and replace him with a string of reactionaries.
not if coherence is a criterion.
but hey, this is texas and these are conservatives. so who really cares?
i'm not debating your kinda arbitrary notion of what sociology is. it's early in the morning, the sun is out and i'm in a decent mood. kinda like what happened with those scottich dudes that explains how Enlightenment suddenly appeared as a Thing. whatever.
and this is a textbook bidness. the extent to which a textbook gets caught is probably a function of the budget of the school district which would determine what real information can be procured for the students to read. textbooks are best as expensive coasters and doorstops.
so naturally this disinformation will probably disproportionately be inflicted on kids in poorer school districts. it's the conservative way.
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Dogs Clean.
America had nothing to do with “The Enlightenment” that was all the U.K.s’ baggage. Coming out of the middle ages, monarchy, religion, all the trappings that held people back, pegged them in a hole. It was a time of great thinkers taking stair steps from the time of Fancis Bacon and his Scientific method(thank-you God) to Descartes and his critical rationalism to Locke and his tabula rasa to Hume and his “A Treatise of Human Nature” to D'Holbach and his “Systèm de la natureto” All of which from around Lockes’ time had the advancements of Newton and his, well you know that one. All this to find God, amazing how faith has driven so many so far, and yet man still continues to try and deny something bigger than ourselves, how egotistical is that.
Ah, yes, I remember now, their was Diderot the Imperialist, Voltaire the Anti-Christian, (conformed religion I’m sure) and Rousseau the Musician and Political Economist and their collective works which became the first 11 volumes of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, the first “real” textbooks, as they were pretty much excepted by “everybody” as educational. Bet those 11 books weren’t skewed…. even if later Rousseau came to regard the Encyclopédie as the work of the devil. By the way I don’t believe in the devil, just God.
Anyway, it wasn’t like Kant just woke up one day in Germany and decided the Enlightenment had arrived, it had been building and singing its way throughout the land. Kant’s Categorical Imperative:
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("Act only on that maxim (intention) whereby at the same time you can will that it shall become a universal law" Another formulation is: "Always act to treat humanity, whether in yourself or in others, as an end in itself, never merely as a means." What Kant means by this is that a rational being should not be used as a means to another person's happiness; if we use another person as a means to our ends then we have removed that person's autonomy.)
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This thinking was a culmination of his elders and his own perceptions of the world and his own attempts to find and to prove Gods’ existence, especially after reading the 11 volumes of the encyclopedia, lord help us all (yes tongue in cheek). Alas he couldn’t prove God existed, no one can, that’s why it’s called faith, and it’s only blind if you are. And, no, faith doesn’t make you a conservative either.
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Kant attempted to show how philosophy could prove the existence of God. Unfortunately, for him his previous work showed that we could not know reality directly as thing-in-itself. What is real in itself is beyond our experience. Even if God exists, we can not know God as he really is.
For Kant the Christian could have faith in God, and this faith would be consonant with reason and the categorical imperative. Given that human beings have the autonomy to create moral values, it would not be irrational to believe in a God who gives purpose to the moral realm.
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By now almost all literate and affluent man had read those damned books, shit, and that was it we were ready to acknowledge science and our new place within our scientific world, religion was no longer the chains that would bind humans to their king. Hell, religion would no longer even bind us together anymore, as it once did; now it would tear us apart. But faith remained.
Faith, and hard core religion, (gotta love those protestants’ with a nod to you Martin Luther) who would eventually get the nerve up to leave that catholic/monarcy and sail away with their fabulous books, not really, to the New World eventually to tell the Tories and their kind to kindly “kiss their asses” we don’t want you stinkin tea, we got Indians to kill, your no help, this slavery shit you keep sending us is rotten, get the fuck out, oh by the way, we quit. Have you met George……And American was on her way, God I love that. Anyway, back to Tom. You intentionally drag me off-track so my post is so damn long that nobody will read, I got your number roachboy.
Thomas Jefferson WAS a reactionary.
The Revolution was a reaction of the teachings from “The Enlightenment.”
Thomas Jefferson resides within the realms of one of the first Political Enlightenment thinkers, but he was not a card carrying member of “The Enlightenment.”
“The Enlightenment” was a specific time when mankind FIRST realized his place within the world, his moral place, his “natural” place, as regarding science and nature, i.e. gravity, solar system, encyclopedias, etc. Thomas Jefferson KNEW his place in that world, it was as an American President.
“The Enlightenment” was considered over when Jefferson was only 16 years old, perhaps this is why his thinking was so developed by the enlightenment thinkers, but it doesn’t change the fact that he just doesn’t fit there, nor does he belong their.
He was his OWN MAN, A NEW THINKER IN A NEW WORLD. HE WAS AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AT WORK, in its purest meaning. He may have been contradictory, even controversial in his time and ours. But I still think he was one of the greatest Americans to walk these grounds. Still, not a member of “The Enlightenment.”
Purest meaning of American Exceptionalism, taking into account Tocquevilles’ development and definition of the term:
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Born out of revolution, the United States is a country organized around an ideology which includes a set of dogmas about the nature of a good society. Americanism, as different people have pointed out, is an "ism" or ideology in the same way that communism or fascism or liberalism are isms. As G. K. Chesterton put it: "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.
That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence. . . ." As noted in the Introduction, the nation's ideology can be described in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissezfaire.
The revolutionary ideology which became the American Creed is liberalism in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century meanings, as distinct from conservative Toryism, statist communitarianism, mercantilism, and noblesse oblige dominant in monarchical, state-church-formed cultures.
Other countries' senses of themselves are derived from a common history. Winston Churchill once gave vivid evidence to the difference between a national identity rooted in history and one defined by ideology in objecting to a proposal in 1940 to outlaw the anti-war Communist Party. In a speech in the House of Commons, Churchill said that as far as he knew, the Communist Party was composed of Englishmen and he did not fear an Englishman.
In Europe, nationality is related to community, and thus one cannot become un-English or un-Swedish. Being an American, however, is an ideological commitment. It is not a matter of birth. Those who reject American values are un-American.
The American Revolution sharply weakened the noblesse oblige, hierarchically rooted, organic community values which had been linked to Tory sentiments, and enormously strengthened the individualistic, egalitarian, and anti-statist ones which had been present in the settler and religious background of the colonies.
These values were evident in the twentieth-century fact that, as H. G. Wells pointed out close to ninety years ago, the United States not only has lacked a viable socialist party, but also has never developed a British or European-type Conservative or Tory party. Rather, America has been dominated by pure bourgeois, middle-class individualistic values.
As Wells put it: "Essentially America is a middle-class [which has] become a community and so its essential problems are the problems of a modern individualistic society, stark and clear." He enunciated a theory of America as a liberal society, in the classic anti-statist meaning of the term:
It is not difficult to show for example, that the two great political parties in America represent only one English party, the middle-class Liberal party. . . . There are no Tories . . . and no Labor Party. . . . [T]he new world [was left] to the Whigs and Nonconformists and to those less constructive, less logical, more popular and liberating thinkers who became Radicals in England, and Jeffersonians and then Democrats in America.
All Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one sort or another. . . . The liberalism of the eighteenth century was essentially the rebellion . . . against the monarchical and aristocratic state--against hereditary privilege, against restrictions on bargains. Its spirit was essentially anarchistic--the antithesis of Socialism. It was anti-State.
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Hell, he had his OWN MOVEMENT, JEFFERSONIANS, o.k. followers, still, I kind of like that. He was beyond “The Enlightenment.” He had learned from it, moved past it, taken from it what he needed and made it his own.
HE Was An Enlightened Man, educated by those who taught him. Stop holding him back with those/his intellectual elders. Let him be his own man, he deserves it.
I wonder, did anyone every read textbooks. It would seem that we have all learned in one way or another from a textbook, and I would believe that somehow we have all made it to this point, regardless of or because of that education. We all have different opinions taken from different perspectives, but unless you just didn’t go to school, or your parents home schooled you with books they wrote themselves, you read textbooks that were created by “Professionals” as best they could, and I would like to think, as crazy as we all are, we turned out all right. And their was some crazy shit in our textbooks, talk about skewed, and even crazier in our parents, let alone our grandparents’, have you every read that shit. Remember when the best education a woman could get was a Secretarial Degree; don’t forget how to make the coffee. Jiminy Cricket.
I know, that was a lot, I’d been saving it up. I haven’t felt this intellectually alive in years, oh doggy this is fun. AND NO I’M NOT BEING SARCASTIC, this is fun, but that’s just my perspective.
Bus. Damn it, I'm never gonna get those dishes clean.