entalism became Empiricism — and the Enlightenment was under way.
Rationalism was also a hallmark of the Enlightenment, and it really became possible when Bacon’s ideas became prominent. The great social movement that preceded the Enlightenment was the reforming of religion from Medieval Catholicism. Purifying the church had an associated sense of self: the Puritan was personally charged with bringing about God’s will. The artisans and merchants of the new world were doing God’s work in the holy mission of commerce, and continued to do God’s work the next century with tobacco and coffee (and chocolate) in hand. It is a commonplace of American political theory that our individualism comes out of the Puritan tradition — but it is Puritanism put through a refiner’s fire, with all the godly dross burned away. The Puritan stands as God’s hand on Earth; the Enlightenment philosophe stands as his own value.
And these elevated individuals were interested in their own origins and status. The new individualism brought into existence a new literary genre, the novel, which went hand in hand with the romance through the nineteenth century. The romance, which gave its name to the entire period — the Romantic era — is a literary form about social standing, concerned with loss of status and the formation of societies; the novel is a literary form about the formation of an individual mind.
The distinction we now think important between High literature and Pop literature is a very recent evolution, dating from the end of the nineteenth century, when improved printing technology, high-speed presses, fast inks, and the invention of cheap, wood-pulp paper broadened out the definition of “the public.” But literature as a concept did not exist in the modern sense — that is, as a branch of language art distinct from useful or purely utilitarian writing — before about 1795.
The Enlightenment was a powerful and glorious new form of culture, transforming post-Medieval traditions in unexpected ways. Along the way it took in Romantic individualism, unleashing artistic and economic powers that were unprecedented. The slave trade, and then slavery itself, was banished from the west and doors opened on possibilities that were dazzling for these creatures of Prometheus.
But anything that grows also dies; for every Goethe there is a Dickens, pointing to the hard fact that so much of Victorian prosperity is grounded in the suffering of children. The Enlightenment achieved a kind of perfection of the human spirit — But of course, evolution does not stop there; perfection is never good enough. The very coherence of the Enlightenment sensibility shaped the coherence of its dialectical challenge. In fact, the dialectic was defined by Hegel for just that reason: the individualist thesis of the Enlightenment calls its antithesis into existence and shapes the form it takes. In place of the rational individual came the worship of the blood, with the state as the form of the Hegelian world-spirit. The mad rationalism of the Directoire was answered first by Empire and then by the failed democratic revolutions of 1848. The Romantic era wound down a hundred years later in the disillusionment and spiritual paralysis of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” – which itself was dialectically answered by the Führerprinzip — and by a living dialectical as the disillusioned exile Karl Marx sat down in the Reading Room of the British Library.”
We live in another end period now: the old world is visibly, palpably, passing away. The Enlightenment has been set aside in this country; it just does not cooperate too well with the nanny state, with the imperial presidency or with neocon globalist agendas. The drive to roll back the Enlightenment entirely kicked into high gear on September 12, 2001 — and it continues to accelerate.
And what comes next?
If the lessons of history mean anything at all, the next wave will be a dialectical reaction against the deadening hand of neocon globalism and the nanny state. Of some kind.
But it may not be a recreation of the best years of the Enlightenmen