the Enlightenment: Who What When Where?

[Evie]

And coffee.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I always chalked it sort of up to a technologically advancing society having a lot more room for idle hands to write abstract musings and time for literate eyes to spend the time reading that sort of thing.

Otium, ftw!

But what I was initially marveling at was that we've gone a solid two centuries (in precisely such favorable circumstances as you note) without an intellectual advance of comparable magnitude.

 

[Farm Boy]

I don't know that idleness is poised to make more breakthroughs. I think it's tapped. Pretty soon though, like Agent Smith prognosticated, it won't be us thinking. That'll be an advancement of sorts!

 

[Narz]

I wonder if Marx and Freud together represent an intellectual transformation of somewhat similar magnitude: looking past surfaces to deep structures governing our personal and social lives. And you'd throw Darwin in the mix too, somehow.

Somehow? Darwin was on another level. Psychology & economics are cool & all but biology is actual science.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I don't mean stature. I just mean that I didn't know how to combine him, conceptually, with the other two, into one intellectual movement.

 

[Moriarte]

Significant contributions to the body of science. They are, perhaps, extraordinary scientists, all three, but is it valuable to extract their contributions to form an abstract fraternity?

 

[Edmund Ironside]

What we have learned and discovered with Modern medicine in the last 100 to 200 years such as anesthetics, disinfectants, antibiotics, etc, I would think has had a more profound impact on the our lives then anything from the age of enlightenment, imo.

 

[AmazonQueen]

I don't think anyone was aware that the Renaissance or the Enlightenment were going on at the time nor were the most significant thinkers readily apparent at the time. Perhaps we are just too close to our current age to have the perspective to judge it.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Renaissance knew it was the Renaissance; it's the era's own term for itself. Don't know that the same is true of the Enlightenment.

But that's part of the nature of my question, is to ask us to try to get sufficient distance from our own time to try to get the history-eye view of it.

This isn't directly on my point, which has to do with intellectual movements, but we can know about our recent history that posterity will always regard the following things as representing significant accomplishments: the moon landing, the development of nuclear weaponry and the development of the internet. What the twentieth century will likely be known for to posterity is the depletion of 100 million years buildup of fossil fuels in a century and the resulting environmental impact.

So you can sometimes get a purchase on your own era.

Though, of course, you are right in the end ,Amazon Queen; we cannot always do so with much precision. Things we think will be important turn out not to have much lasting impact, and the opposite as well.

And @Edmund Ironside, any practical advance coming out of the natural sciences, I'm going to count as fundamentally post-Enlightenment, since the Enlightenment set down the Scientific Method.

There, and earlier with Replaceable Parts, I've used capitals to signal Civ-tech-tree style intellectual advances is what I have in mind. Though some of these, of course, are so monumental as to name Civ's eras.

 

[Angst]

i think @Birdjaguar hit the jackpot when asking whether it's an extension of islamic world philosophy
i find the enlightenment highly overrated in a lot of respects, like, i understand its exceptional use outside the humanities; within the humanities themselves, it's not particularly unique

I also think the enlightenment is specifically western european.
In many respects, it mimicked generally analogous eras in the classical/hellenistic world, multiplied by the more stable (fewer existential wars) area it was acting upon.

i knew you'd say this lol
regardless of what the enlightenment is, saying it's "mimicking" classical philosophy is not giving it enough credit. we were doing that for 1½ milennia

 

[Birdjaguar]

@Angst After all Plato gave us Atlantis and a couple hundred years of conspiratorial folly about ancient lost civilizations and space aliens. Thank you classical
Greece!

 

[Plains-Cow]

 

[Kyriakos]

i knew you'd say this lol
regardless of what the enlightenment is, saying it's "mimicking" classical philosophy is not giving it enough credit. we were doing that for 1½ milennia

^^
Not classical philosophy, though. Math/science.
One of the pillars of the enlightnenment was Fermat, who even attempted to "rewrite" lost math books from the hellenistic era.
Also notable due to Descartes' Waterloo folium.

 

[Birdjaguar]

From the House of Wisdom link above.

"Following his predecessors, al-Ma'mun would send expeditions of scholars from the House of Wisdom to collect texts from foreign lands. In fact, one of the directors of the House was sent to Constantinople with this purpose. During this time, Sahl ibn Harun, a Persian poet and astrologer, was the chief librarian of the Bayt al-Hikma. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), an Arab Nestorian Christian physician and scientist, was the most productive translator, producing 116 works for the Arabs.

The patron of this foundation was under Caliph al-Ma'mun. Al-Ma'mun established the House of Wisdom, putting Hunayn ibn Ishaq in charge, who then became the most celebrated translator of Greek texts. As "Sheikh of the translators," he was placed in charge of the translation work by the caliph. Hunayn ibn Ishaq translated the entire collection of Greek medical books, including famous pieces by Galen and Hippocrates.[27] The Sabian Thābit ibn Qurra (826–901) also translated great works by Apollonius, Archimedes, Euclid and Ptolemy. Translations of this era were superior to earlier ones, since the new Abbasid scientific tradition required better and better translations, and the emphasis was many times put on incorporating new ideas to the ancient works being translated.[15][28] By the second half of the ninth century, al-Ma'mun's Bayt al-Hikma was the greatest repository of books in the world and had become one of the greatest hubs of intellectual activity during the Medieval era, attracting the most brilliant Arab and Persian minds.[20]

The House of Wisdom eventually acquired a reputation as a center of learning, although universities as they are modernly known did not yet exist at this time—knowledge was transmitted directly from teacher to student without any institutional surrounding. Maktabs soon began to develop in the city from the 9th century on and, in the 11th century, Nizam al-Mulk founded the Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad, one of the first institutions of higher education in Iraq.

 

[Evie]

Renaissance knew it was the Renaissance; it's the era's own term for itself. Don't know that the same is true of the Enlightenment.

As best as I know, that isn't so much the case. The term did appear during the period (Vasari, sixteenth century), but at the time he applied to the artistic changes began with Giotto and Cimabue more than two centuries earlier. As best as I know, it was a term that was pretty much always retroactively applied, rather than contemporary. My understanding is that it only became common usage in the nineteenth century.

The English may not have known they were living in the Enlightement, but the French certaintly knew they were living under Les Lumières (The lights, in the sense of the enlightened or perhaps even more so, the enlighteners) by the mid-eighteenth century. Enlightenment is merely a later English derivation of that term.

 

[innonimatu]

Has any intellectual development of magnitude equivalent to the Enlightenment happened since the Enlightenment?

Or is modern thinking still best described as post-Enlightenment?

The Enlightenment is over-rated. I thing it's not even a thing. It was just the end of the ancient regime era when religious sentiment died out. But religious sentiment had been decaying as a political force at least since Westphalia. When all signatories, the whole of the european region, agreed to be cynics about religion because there had been too much dying over it already. That was when Europe changed - the Wars of Religion. Their end. Both commoners and rulers came out of it with different perspectives I think, and the secularization of societies followed naturally. It was a slow process only because religious institutions played the role of social security and NGOs (parking spot for useless relatives) of the era and therefore remained important.

As for scientific developments, they followed from the alchemists, though chemistry, it was a gradual process. The really important steps imo were two:
- the early modern era spread of universities throughout Europe, way beyond the few medieval ones, which created more opportunities for scholars and a drive to publish results.
- the multiplication of polities in Europe, which lead to may courts sponsoring weirdos and allowed room for the move from alchemy to modern chemistry. Those persecuted out of one state could just continue their worn in another.

Many of these were frauds. But some advanced knowledge. Europe's main advantage compared to the rest of the world then was political fragmentation. This applied to all kings of scholars in fact, not just science ones. Voltaire or Rosseau could say tings than made the french crown or aristocracy very unhappy (and violent) because they could do it outside their reach. And if they pissed the calvinits or whomever in their place of exile they could move elsewhere. This also required a good level of economic prosperity and relative peace.
Happy times in Europe, between the madness of the wars of religion and the boundless ambition of Napoleon. Basically what is required for prosperity is not to screw up a good thing ongoing. States had limited ambitions, wars were fought with limited aims even when they were "world wars", the continent shared a cultural understanding but allowed for different cultures to exist in different states.

 

[Hygro]

And coffee.

I believe this hypothesis. And that it was no coincidence England was sending soldiers to make sure they could get tea from India back to factory workers in England, speaking of creating surplus for leisured people to use their caffeinated minds to do things.

 

[Narz]

Yeah caffeine taking some market share from alcohol as a mass consumed beverage had to have made a huge difference. So they got something way better than gold from the Americas.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Coffee originated in Ethiopia or Yemen and was brought to Europe by the Ottomans. Coffee came from the Americas the same way sugar did.

 

[Narz]

From the House of Wisdom link above.

"Following his predecessors, al-Ma'mun would send expeditions of scholars from the House of Wisdom to collect texts from foreign lands. In fact, one of the directors of the House was sent to Constantinople with this purpose. During this time, Sahl ibn Harun, a Persian poet and astrologer, was the chief librarian of the Bayt al-Hikma. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), an Arab Nestorian Christian physician and scientist, was the most productive translator, producing 116 works for the Arabs.

The patron of this foundation was under Caliph al-Ma'mun. Al-Ma'mun established the House of Wisdom, putting Hunayn ibn Ishaq in charge, who then became the most celebrated translator of Greek texts. As "Sheikh of the translators," he was placed in charge of the translation work by the caliph. Hunayn ibn Ishaq translated the entire collection of Greek medical books, including famous pieces by Galen and Hippocrates.[27] The Sabian Thābit ibn Qurra (826–901) also translated great works by Apollonius, Archimedes, Euclid and Ptolemy. Translations of this era were superior to earlier ones, since the new Abbasid scientific tradition required better and better translations, and the emphasis was many times put on incorporating new ideas to the ancient works being translated.[15][28] By the second half of the ninth century, al-Ma'mun's Bayt al-Hikma was the greatest repository of books in the world and had become one of the greatest hubs of intellectual activity during the Medieval era, attracting the most brilliant Arab and Persian minds.[20]

The House of Wisdom eventually acquired a reputation as a center of learning, although universities as they are modernly known did not yet exist at this time—knowledge was transmitted directly from teacher to student without any institutional surrounding. Maktabs soon began to develop in the city from the 9th century on and, in the 11th century, Nizam al-Mulk founded the Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad, one of the first institutions of higher education in Iraq.

I wonder what happened. How do you go from thought leader, inspiring backwards Europeans to progress to becoming practical medieval yourself (non-secular societies, seen globally as the face as terrorism, etc)?

Note : not saying all Muslim majority countries are like this, Islam is not a race, etc.