165b final

im gonna lose it

 “Men being, as has been said, by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent... when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority.”

• Who/What: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

• Meaning: 

  • Suggesting that people are able to revoke consent in a meaningful passion, in an idealistic treatise that says “government is good”, it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that it is difficult to undo 

  • For Hobbes you can’t undo it but for Locke it’s unclear on how you’d undo it but he thinks it can be undone if circumstances allow it to happen because you’d be within your rights to do so 

  • If you created a new form of government, it would be a legitimate form of government, as legitimate as the government beforehand

  • The condition of being free

  • Patriarchy is not natural

    • It may be the case that fathers lorded over their children and kings over their land, but that’s not the natural state of things

    • This is is how history produced a perversion where people are removed from their natural rights

    • In the beginning, fathers government of children and it developed into people thinking monarchy is okay because they’re used to being subordinate to their fathers therefore you should be comfortable with a monarch

  • True freedom is going on a path to finding out where your autonomy is from, by nature we are free, equal, and independent and we shouldn’t be subordinate to someone else unless we consent to doing so

  • All absolute powers at any time when people find themselves put out of their natural estate of freedom, equality, and independence is a form of tyranny and therefore illegitimate form of rule

• Significance:

  • Foundational to political philosophy

  • Emphasized the importance of natural liberty/natural rights/consent of the governed

  • Became very important to American Revolutionary ideology

  • Epitomizes Enlightenment values by recognizing rights/equality for the individuals and criticizing authority/divine right of kings

  • Expanded on ancient republicanism to ground legitimate politics in our natural condition as human beings

“Toleration is of all things the most conducive to the return of the golden age and the formation of a concert and harmony of a, number of voices and instruments of different tones and notes as agreeable at the very least as the uniformity of a single voice.”

• Who/What: Pierre Bayle, SELECTIONS, ON SUPERSTITIONS AND TOLERANCE

• Meaning:

  • Toleration isn’t something that is done because we as humans have to do it, but toleration should be done because it is the best way to be

  • Toleration is the key to achieving societal perfect harmony

  • Metaphor that toleration is producing something like the rich harmonics of choral singing instead of just a person singing on their own

  • Toleration produces the best versions of ourselves

  • Toleration isn’t a negative doctrine that’s imposed because of circumstance but it’s simply a good thing

• Significance:

  • Advocating for religious tolerance at a time of heavy persecution was very controversial at the time 

  • He also argued that it was actually more pious to be tolerant of others which was a groundbreaking notion

  • Toleration allows for people to stop paying attention to other people and instead be more reflective and cultivate their own individual pious life

 “We find, in all religions of the earth, a God of armies, a jealous God, an avenging God, a destroying God, a God, who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers, as a duty, serve to his taste. Lambs, bulls, children, men, heretics, infidels, kings, whole nations are sacrificed to him... the gloomy ideas of the divinity, far from consoling men under the evils of life, have everywhere disquieted and confused their minds, and produced follies destructive to their happiness.”

• Who/What: BARON D’HOLBACH, Le Bons Sens – “Common Sense” – No Need of Theology, only of Reason”

• Meaning:

  • Religious intolerance and destructive behavior is fostered by an interpretation of God as wrathful

  • A belief in the call of divinity causes those to be confused and produce follies that are destructive to their own happiness

  • Religion makes people believe in a higher power that they have to sacrifice for and it doesn’t bring any comfort to the evils of life

  • Atheism is associated with immorality, but the way religious people approach life is anything but moral and and just for their minds– D’holbach points out the hypocrisy of contemporary religion

• Significance:

  • Positive argument for atheism, the only way you can be virtuous is by being atheist. Because you’re listening to reason instead of divine voices to become virtuous

  • Contrasted from Bayle’s version of atheism which only proposes the belief that it is possible to have a society of virtuous atheists but D’holbach argues that the only way to be moral is to not rely on religion at all

“O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are so many troubles and trappings necessary for one to know you? Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one's conscience in the silence of the passions? There you have true philosophy. Let us learn to

be satisfied with that, and without envying the glory of those famous men who are immortalized in the republic of letters, let us try to set between them and us that glorious distinction which people made long ago between two great peoples: one knew how to speak well; the other how to act well.”

• Who/What: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

• Meaning:

  • This statement was meant to be a subversion of typical Enlightenment thinking through encouraging introspection and common sense rather than external forms of knowledge

  • However, by doing this he is still trying to promote a different form of epistemological thought and definitions for philosophy which also is just the enlightenment

  • Without being envious of other enlightenment thinkers who are trying to promote different ways of thinking we should all go back to our roots and really self reflect on what we personally think is right instead of building our morals from another person

• Significance:

  • A really important document that tries to challenge the optimism of the Enlightenment

  • Tries arguing that Enlightenment thinking is actually tainting human morality and virtue 

  • Not only did it contribute to enlightenment discussions on morality and virtue but it also played more into the romantic movement by de-emphasizing pragmatism in favor of human sentimentality

“If we value independence, the love of study is, of all the passions, the one that contributes most to our happiness... the love of study is much less necessary to the happiness of men than it is to that of women.... women are excluded, by definition, from every kind of glory, and when, by chance, one is born with a rather superior soul, only study remains to console her for all the exclusions and all the dependencies to which she finds herself condemned by her place in society.”

• Who/What: Émilie du Châtelet’s Theory of Happiness 1744

• Meaning:

  • Women can teach you to be happy within constraints in a way that men cannot

  • For a woman, you have to figure out your own independence within the constraints in which you live

  • Studying is okay for the happiness of a man but for a woman it is absolutely essential because women are excluded from every kind of glory

  • Only study remains to console her for the exclusions and dependencies that she’s condemned from

  • Space of freedom in study but argues that study is the passion most necessary for happiness for EVERYONE

  • Women have something to teach about everybody and themselves, EVERYONE needs to be studying regardless

  • Her general observation that happiness needs to be found where you sit, happiness is found in your personal circumstances that you are embedded in means that you all have constraints in your life and your path to happiness may vary from person to person

  • Women show that principle of “being happy where you are” more than men can because men have the liberty to all dream of being president one day

• Significance:

  • Foundational feminist theory

  • Allows for encouraging women to study and participate in the Enlightenment

  • It also advocated for women’s personal intellectual fulfillment and personal autonomy during the Enlightenment, which typically only allowed academic  pursuit for men

 “Nature produces forms that are more regular the closer nature comes, bit by bit, to its putative midpoint, in a moderate climate, as was shown in the first chapter. Thus, our own and the Greek concepts of beauty, which are taken from the most regular appearance, are more correct than those conceived by peoples who are at a half remove from the exact likeness of their Creator.”

• Who/What: Johann Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity

• Meaning:

  • There was not just one antiquity

  • Looking at art from different periods of time, you can see transformations of Greek culture

  • Historically changing background/dynamic in which through art you could understand change and broader culture

  • All sorts of things depend on climate

  • The influence of climate invigorates art, and Greek climate invigorates beautiful art

  • The perfect climate for art is one where you don’t have to work too hard because it’s warm, not too cold, etc. 

  • Greek climate is ideal for art and that’s why their art looks like that

  • Winckelmann's theory of climate and art, moderation is key to the flourishing of the best kinds of art

  • Europeans, specifically those living in temperate parts of Europe are closer to living in the likenesses of their creators

  • They are gonna create the best kind of art

  • White reflects the most rays of life and the whiter a body is the more beautiful it is

  • Greek statues were painted and he argues that they NEEDED to be white because white is beautiful 

  • Conforms to the idea that “form is the most beautiful thing”

  • Participating in broader set of prescriptive and normative projects where certain standards of beauty are elevated to a higher standard 

• Significance:

  • Advocated for going back to the ancients

  • Also was a pretty foundation document for white supremacist ideology

  • Symbol of perfection of Greek Art

  • Advocating for a return to classicism/neo-classicism

  • Efforts to explain standards of beauty, now it’s considered a worthy science that comes out of the enlightenment

  • Advocates for aesthetics to be studied on its own terms

  • Nazism as an obsession of the purity of Greek art

  • 18th century science has an intricate complicated relationship with race, aesthetics, and science, importance of history to art amd theories of beauty

  • Normative/prescriptive definitions for what beauty is

“He may call himself an naturalist... who well distinguishes the parts of natural bodies by sight... Natural science is that classification and that name-giving of the natural bodies… The foundation of botany consists in the division of plants and systematic name giving, generic and specific...”

• Who/What: Carl Linnaeus, Systema de Naturae

• Meaning:

  • It is science because it is theology

    • Reflects the kind of orderly world that God built for us

  • Ecology, ecological natural history

  • If you can create proper names and descriptions for everything and if you do that you can create systematic laws

  • You can discover certain natural laws by amassing a massive quantity of information in each one

  • You can find a lot of information studying plants because plants aren’t running away when you’re trying to study them

  • Proposed to organize the natural world into 3 kingdoms: minerals, vegetables, and animals

  • Not just a chart of animals, but a chart that shows the fundamental architecture of a divinely ordered universe

• Significance:

  • Linnaeus was responsible for the naming of nature in the 18th century 

  • Established binomial nomenclature that we still use today

  • Allowed for the consistent global naming of creatures/foundations of modern taxonomy

 “if you care for true piety, let us not feign agreement where diversity is evidently the plan and purpose of Providence... Why should we make ourselves unrecognizable to each other in the most important concerns of our life by masquerading, since God has stamped everyone, not without reason, with his own facial features?... a union of faiths is not tolerance; it is diametrically opposed to true tolerance!”

• Who/What: Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or On Religious Power and Judaism

• Meaning:

  • The ultimate project of “converting everyone to some higher standard so you can leave behind “the most important concerns of your life” by flattening out the particularities of your individual features is NOT the plan of providence

    • Trying to achieve a higher standard by abandoning what is most important to you is not how you achieve enlightenment

  • True tolerance can’t include something like unity at the end of the day but diversity and enduring difference

• Significance:

  • Mendelssohn was a deeply radical figure

  • Deeply inside the enlightenment and knew all of its main figures and main institutions but mendelsohn also lay outside of it

  • Claims for rationality could in fact be a mask for more parochial interests

  • Rationality might be a way of masking what you really mean which is christianity

  • New forms of older arguments for ex) voltaire’s arguments on toleration had cast jews governed remnant clinging to irrational laws when jesus os “more rational”

  • Calls attention to reflexes of christian enlightenment/europe and forces people to question if consensus is really the aim of the enlightenment

“To be sure we cannot hope any more to come upon the unaltered original human form anywhere in the world. .... But that portion of the earth between the 31st and 52nd parallels in the Old World (which seems to earn the name of Old World even from the standpoint of peopling) is rightly held to be that... where man too must have departed the least from his original formation because from here he is equally well prepared for all transplantations. Here, to be sure, we find white inhabitants...”

• Who/What: Kant, of the Different Races

• Meaning:

  • With white people, you can see the closest version of Adam

  • What’s interesting abt white ppl isn’t just that they’re closest to the original adams but that they’re the best poised to flourish all over the world because they have the seed of/they are prepared for all the transformations to come

  • On the other hand, there’s a theory in the 18th century that if you have a climatological view where black people are black because there’s carbon in the air– shows a robust literature that race isn’t something that is genetically coded but environmentally coded

• Significance:

  • Debate on whether or not Jews were white

  • Foundational document for scientific racism 

  • Establishes a form of explicit race theory that placed white Europeans at the top 

  • Also reflects developing climatological views on race that were popular in the 18th century

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even it its best state, is but a necessary evil... Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest.... Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.”

• Who/What: Thomas Paine, Common Sense

• Meaning:

  • What is primarily important are social relations, sociability, society is the first thing about how humans relate to one another

  • Moral virtue is prior to government and in fact moral virtue could judge the actions of kings

  • Similar to Rousseau who says that we could live free without government but we cannot we are built in such a way to try and become better, we want to have more and because we want more, we need government to manage us

  • Government to help repair the fact we can’t be virtuous on our own

  • Best government is the most virtuous government or the government that is the best one is one that allows virtue to flourish 

  • We need a thick moral community before you have a proper government, people need to behave towards one another with obligation and affection

  • Government is not just a set of institutions, it is the making of a people

• Significance:

  • Document that epitomizes the language and beliefs of the Enlightenment

  • Criticisms of the British government, argues that the British government is the combination of two ancient tyrannies, monarchy and aristocracy

  • Justification of rebellion that you are entitled to rebel if it is not representative of your interests

  • World will be peaceful if it is full of republics

  • Reflection of the 7 years war, diplomatic organization

  • Was a foundational document for the American Revolution that convinced colonists to support independence from Britain

  • Advocated for critique of monarchial systems and natural rights

“If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs”.

• Who/What: Maximillien Robespierre, On Principles of Political Morality, 1794

• Meaning:

  • A good government may need to use terror in a time of revolution

  • There is an occasion where the use of terror is justified

  • Terror is important to protect virtue as a form of swift justice

  • Virtue is a foundation during peacetime but when revolution comes by Terror has to exist as a form of virtue to enforce democratic ideals

  • Terror is not just snapping off of heads but it’s the terror of justice

  • Terror of the law itself and its the opposite of virtue

  • Virtue requires you to do certain things but Terror says “you must”

  • Revolutionary terror, the law of suspects, punishment of conspirators and traitors are a form of pedagogy

  • They are trying to create the citizens that the republic is going to need when the revolution is going to end

  • It is necessary to change hearts and minds

  • You can have as many formal laws as you want, but if people don’t believe in them and behave as that, you are going to have empty formalism, you won’t have a living citizenship or living republic

  • Terror shapes revolutionary citizenship

• Significance:

  • Controversial in the face of violence in France at the time

  • Gets Robespierre caught in the legal net himself

  • Logic of the terror is that it’s hard to rein it in

  • St. Just, George Damons, Robespierre all get sent to the chopping block for conspiring under the same criminal statues for conspiracy against the revolution, aspiring to tyranny, everything they worked for to try and eradicate

  • I guess contributes to connections on Enlightenment and Revolution

  • Reflection of everything that went wrong during the Enlightenment

  • Liberty, equality, and fraternity leads to regicide

  • People are now retroactively defining what the Enlightenment had been about, new phase of looking back at the Revolution to put it in the past

“The more one examines the apparently most active personages in the Revolution, the more one finds in them something passive and mechanical. We cannot repeat too often that men do not lead the Revolution; it is the Revolution that uses men. They are right when they say it goes all alone. This phrase means that never has the Divinity shown itself so clearly in any human event. If the vilest instruments are employed, punishment is for the sake of regeneration.”

• Who/What: Joseph de Maistre, Considérations on France, 1796

• Meaning:

  • Argues that the bloodshed of the revolution is a dark pedagogy for France and Europe that had forgotten the workings of God

  • Jacobins thought they were in charge but they were all put to death which confirms that there is a deep logic to the revolution that is working itself out in such a way as to produce the politics that de Maistre was so committed to

  • Revolution was a divine secret way of working towards a moral regeneration

  • Revolution is a means that will get rid of the Enlightenment altogether and work towards the creation of a new Europe that is no longer committed to Enlightenment ideas and instead a new form of Catholic piety

• Significance:

  • Hugely popular with 19th-century conservative Catholic theorists

  • Argues for the understanding of the Revolution as an operation of a broader providential history

  • Foundational for political conservatism, a critique of the Enlightenment, and important for counter-Revolutionary thought

Monogenesis

• Definition:

  • The notion that we are all one species, all the people you see around you come from around one common stock

  • Based on the original scriptural passage of Adam and Eve, Tower of Babel also used to explain how humans come from a similar stock and thus become separated

  • Used to explain anthropology, family/gender relations, to explain the origins of clothing, origins of shame, explaining the common behaviors and sentiments of humans

• When: 18th-century

• Important Figures:

  • Linnaeus, Buffon

• Significance: 

  • Used for pious anthropological explanations on human origin 

  • Created a scientific-theological framework for human unity

  • Contrasted polygenism, which was often used to explain racial differences/justify racial hierarchy and slavery

  • Foundational for modern anthropology

  • Plays a diff role in 18th century in human variation discussions

Haskalah

• Definition:

  • Mendelssohn– the reform project in Judaism is Haskalah

  • Hallah is the law, Haskea is the reform movement

  • Project to rethink wisdom in Jewish terms, one of Mendelssohn’s life projects

• When:

  • 18th-19th century

• Important Figures:

  • Mendelssohn

• Significance: 

  • Transforms modern Judaism, creates the landscape

  • Judaism splits in the Reformed vs. Orthodox sections in 19th century, emerges out of the Haskalah tradition, becomes super integrationist

  • It’s not a side movement, its a transformation of judaism in its entirety

Feminism

• Definition:

  • Movement that advocated for the democratization of intellectual culture to involve women as individuals that are capable of achieving Enlightenment and proper education

  • Feminism advocated to free women from patriarchal bondage and for their personal intellectual fulfillment

• Important Figures:Mary Astell, Emilie du Chatelet, Wollstonecraft

• Significance: 

  • Emphasizes the really important role that women had on the Enlightenment and how they were also responsible for spreading the Enlightenment to everyone else

  • Women were involved in the upkeep of reading salons, which helped make the Enlightenment/education more accessible and egalitarian for everyone. 

Epigenesis

• Definition:

  • Theory developed by Aristotle that there aren’t necessarily seeds in either man or woman, it takes two material components and then matter begins to organize itself

  • Matter creating itself that happens when it is configured properly which would then create a living being

  • Something about all living things that come from the exuberance of the material itself

  • Developed the term polygenesis, which defines itself as different races are not different races but instead different species

  • Question of whether or not you could have pious material, pious science– do you need a creator to explain where the more complicated forms of life including humans come from, can that come from the material world itself

• Important Figures:

  • Kant, Blumenbach, Hume

• Significance: sparked debates between many philosophers on where life came from, shows the divide biology/physics with a more divine, ordered world

 The Encyclopédie

• Definition: 

  • First started as a publishing/moneymaking venture cooked up by Andrew Francois le Breton

  • Encyclopédie was a massive reference work edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. It aimed to gather and organize knowledge, reflecting the Enlightenment values of reason and progress.

• When: 18th century

• Important Figures: Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert

• Significance:

  • Dissemination of different beliefs

  • Shows the enlightenment is ideologically incoherent just because theres different perspectives

    • Diderot “progress is the future” versus dolboch “we need to look at the past”

  • It’s also important for the democratization and making information more accessible to the average person

The virtuous atheist

• Definition:

  • A pushback against the longstanding preconception that in order to live in a virtuous life you had to believe in God

  • An attempt to loosen up the traditional association of piety and virtue and atheism/immorality

  • A belief in a virtue independent of piety

• When: 17-18th century

• Important Figures: Bayle, D’Holbach

  • Bayle: It is possible to have a society of virtuous atheists, temperament vs. belief

  • D’holbach: The only path to true morality is reason

• Significance: 

  • Pushback against a longstanding Christian belief that associates atheism with immorality, adultery, treachery, etc.

  • Conceptualizes a belief that morality is not exclusive to religion and that societal good comes from reason and humanism instead of divine command

Aesthetics

• Definition:

  • Greek word meaning experience

  • 18th-century definition is the sciences of perception but later developed to be the sciences of the arts and defining what is beautiful, what is not

  • Part of a broader evaluation thats called the human sciences in the 18th century like anthropology, history, or sciences of human culture

• Important Figures: Kant, Winckelmann, Shaftesbury, Hume, Addison, Lessing

• Significance: 

  • Western definitions of beauty, not just aesthetics, but theory of beauty and a science behind things

  • Effort to explain why you might have a broad consensus even universal consensus as to what constitutes something as beautiful

  • Contributed to controversial race theory debates

Citizenship

• Definition:

  • You not only have the right to live somewhere, you’re protected by the laws of a particular polity

  • In Ancient Greece, it meant that you had the obligation to participate in civil government

  • It is everywhere but considered a precious commodity, but it is derived from your status as a natural person bearing certain kinds of natural rights

  • Government rests on a foundation of citizenship and is there to protect citizens

• Important Figures: John Locke, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Montesquieu

• Significance: 

  • Defines human individualism

  • Important for conversations about natural rights

  • Was important to American doctrine post-revolution

  • Also discussions on citizenship allowed for people to think of individuals own reason, liberty, participation, and it was a cornerstone for modern democracies

  • Transformation from a person as a subject to a person bearing their own individual rights that lead to civic virtue and duty

Monarchical patriotism

• Definition:

  • Love/loyalty for your country is directly related to your loyalty to the monarch

  • Assumed that it was relatively easy to imagine the monarch as a citizen alongside other citizens in this body known as a state

  • Implied the existence of monarchical citizenship, which was controversial because many perceive the monarch as the top of the state with privileges unlike the average citizen, and that he is the entity in which the law flows from

• When: ~Late 17-18th centuries, 

• Important Figures: Thomas Abbt, 

• Significance: Explosions of monarchical patriotism comes after the great defeat of Frederick at the Battle of Kuersdorf in 1759

• Those against anti-monarchical patriotism especially during the French Revolution further amplify discussions on citizenship

The social contract

• Definition: Theory that people agree to form societies and governments in exchange for protection and the benefits of organized life

• When: 17-18th centuries

• Important Figures: Hobbes, Rousseau, John Locke

  • Locke: Natural rights

  • Hobbes: Sovereign

  • Rousseau, general will of the people, popular sovereignty

• Significance: 

  • Allowed for people to redefine government authority as stemming from the people’s agreement to be governed and to give up their own natural freedoms for security

  • Influenced the Declaration of Independence, modern democracy and was foundational for Enlightenment era political thought