Herramientas culturales de China hacia Chile

2 Peter Gay, The E nlightenm ent: The R ise o f M odern P agan ism , (London: W.W. Norton & C o., 1995), p 2 3 5 . G ay points to T hom as A q u in as’ stance w hich allow ed for the co-existen ce o f reason and revelation, a p oin t w hich w as recently m ade by the current Pope.

* Ibid, p 23 4 4 Ibid, 2 3 6 -7

Comedy mirrors the retreat from critical thinking...”5 that marked the Age of

Religion. This hierarchy of values - this subordination o f Reason to the Divine - was inconceivable to the Enlightenment philosophers for, as Gay highlights, ‘philosophy (for the Age o f Enlightenment) was autonomous and omnipotent, or it was nothing.’6

The Age of Enlightenment was thus characterized by “a decline in mysticism, o f growing hope for life and trust in effort, in commitment to inquiry and criticism, o f interest in social reform, o f increased secularism, and a growing

n

willingness to take risks.” This, which Gay suggests was a ‘recovery o f nerve’ of sorts, also marked the clear ambition o f the Age o f Enlightenment - an ambition which, in Descartes’ words, was nothing less than to make men the “masters and possessors o f Nature.”

The decisive break between the medieval philosophers and those o f the Enlightenment was not centered on the role and criticality o f Reason-as-such. Rather, it was on the extent and scope of Reason. While for the medieval philosophers the limit-horizon of Reason was the divine, for the Enlightenment philosophers, Reason was the “tribunal before which all disputes, all differences, were to be resolved.”9 Thus,

5 Ibid, p 236 6 Ibid, p 236

7 Peter Gay, The E nlightenm ent: The S cien ce o f F reedom , (London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), p 6

8 Quoted inGay, The E nlightenm ent: The S cien ce o f F reedom ,p 6

9 Ibid, p2

...[T]he advance of knowledge...meant the advance of reason. In the course of the eighteenth century, the world...was being emptied of mystery. Pseudo science was giving way to science, credence in the miraculous intervention of divine forces was being corroded by the acid of skepticism and overpowered by scientific cosmology. The sacred was being hollowed out from within by the drying up of religious fervor, the call for good sense, the retreat from Augustinian theology.. .and the advance of rationalism...10

In this sense, the Age of Enlightenment fractured, in more ways than one, the divine-based reality that the discourse o f the Age o f Religion had etched out. Yet, despite this ‘fracturing’, the Reality that Reason itself constructed began to assume a universal nature and character and, in this sense, displayed an uncanny resemblance to the ‘condition of the divine’ of the Age o f Religion. Thus, for example, Brinton models the Enlightenment (though with a number o f caveats) by pointing to “an optimistic, this-worldly belief in the power o f human beings, brought up rationally from infancy on as nature meant them to be, to achieve steady and unlimited progress...[which results in]...persons free from prejudice

and compelled by reason - a compulsion to which they freely submit. . 1

Now, Gay, in his interpretation of the Enlightenment, suggests that “the Enlightenment was not an Age of Reason but a Revolt against Rationalism... [and that the Enlightenment’s claim]...was in no way a claim for the omnipotence of reason...[contrarily, it w as]...a political demand for the right to question everything, rather than the assertion that all could be known or mastered by

10 Peter Gay, The E nlightenm ent: The Scien ce o f F reed o m, p 6

11 Crane Brinton, “E nlightenm ent,” in The E n cyclo p a ed ia o f P h ilosoph y. Ed. Paul Edwards, (N ew York: M acM illan Publishing Company, 1967), 4 V ols. V ol 2. pp 519-25

rationality. ,I2 Schoules, however, points out, given the well-known antipathy that

thq philosophes had towards Descartes’ ‘style o f metaphysics’, that while there is ‘a grain o f truth’ in Gay’s assessment,13 Gay’s assessment “fails to recognize that the talk of “omnicompetence of criticism” is itself a manifestation o f the “omnipotence o f reason”, at least in its analytic function.”14 As evidence,

Schoules points to, among others, Condorcet who, referring to Descartes, said: “ ...he had understood that it [‘the right method’] must be derived entirely from those primary and evident truths which we can discover by observing the operations o f the human mind.”15 In the context o f this study what is important to note is that this “metaphysical method” was a “universal method” and was therefore “applied to all the various undertakings o f the human understanding” so

that “every branch of knowledge” was “subjected to analysis”.16

The Cartesian methodology - premised on the Cartesian Self - was essentially schematic in nature in so far as it enabled the creation, maintenance and expansion of a tabular form of representation - a universal mathesis. While it may not have been as dogmatic as the mechanistic rationalists - as Descartes’ provision for a God and other ‘innate truths’ seems to indicate - it did construct, or at least lay out, the conditions in which ‘an ordering o f things’ took place. In this sense, it was also a critical co-constitutive of not simply a rationale, or a