My understanding is that the Enlightenment is a label for a set of ideas which center on applying rational thinking to all aspects of the world. In this viewpoint, the modern world is as irreconcilably wedded to the Enlightenment as can be, and talking of the end seems nonsensical, no? -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
One of the most disastrous unintended consequences of the Bill of Rights springs from the 1st Amendments bar on the establishment of religion. In European countries which have or have had established religions religious belief has withered much more thoroughly than in the USA. Perhaps we should establish a state sponsored Church of the Living God in the USA and let all of the fundamentalists duke it out for control. Then they would be so busy fighting about religion that they would have no time for politics! As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
The effect of state sponsored religion on the non-religious is probably similar to what has happened in Europe. But the combination of state support and benefits, together with a high birthrate, is resulting in a gradual takeover of the country by the fundamentalists (which, like all unsustainable trends, can't go on for ever, but it's anybody's guess at what point it will stop). Do you really want to take the risk that the U.S would be more like Europe?
There is a variety of reasons - most of them very good - that pulling an Atatürk on a modern, reasonably democratic society would be A Bad Idea.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Many of the 18th Century Enlightened philosophers were ministers to their respective kings, and the Enlightenment has been an elite project.
Nowadays, when the elite subscribes to Market Fundamentalism and the political class shows time an again an appalling ignorance of the scientific/technical underpinnings of the way our modern world is organised, it is just conceivable that "the modern world" might unravel through wrong-headed management. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Once the Market Fundamentalists co-opted those words they started to mean their opposites, and lost their potency.
This has actually been a semiotic war. There are plenty of examples of semiotic war from the end of the dark ages onwards, with people writing each other letters and arguing to define reality.
But the Market Fundamentalists have run one of the fastest and most successful semantic campaigns in history, completely debasing and perverting concepts which otherwise showed real promise and squeezing out competing narratives with terrifying effectiveness.
So they were certainly not “ministers to their respective kings”, of which Koselleck writes that they were, on the contrary, to “agree with the king against their own agony”.
I could go on, but you already see my point: whenever the elites act for their own benefit, they still prefer to surround themselves with experts, as a rule. This is not the case when they make decisions for others, and there is a lot more mismanagement there. We like to gripe about all our governments' failures in the Middle East, on health issues, retirement funds, etc., yet do those failures truly affect the elites as much as the rest of society? I don't think so.
The difference is not that great from the 18th century either. Kings' ministers didn't rule *for* the common people then, nor do they now. Social progress did occur, but it was paid for in blood. And today ministers have MBAs and PhDs, which admittedly didn't exist in the 18th century... -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
Louis XIV reactive absolutist reign owes much to la fronde upheaval that would have granted new powers to the parliament and the judiciary. The defeat of la fronde "exiled" progressive thought to the parlors (the salons) and the province. The fables of La Fontaine are political treatise, just as the careful extraordinary works of the Bordeaux landholder Montaigne.
It is fitting that Louis XIV left the state in shambles. His reign simply postponed an inevitable revolution.
I do find that qualifying any major intellectual movement as elite is reductive and somewhat a tautology. There are simple requirements for philosophical speculation in periods of repressive zeitgeist- education, free time, a minimum guarantee of livelihood, a tolerated or clandestine network for the diffusion of works, a knack for dissimulation. It is rare that a serf or peasant could fill the bill. In the rare occasions someone rose from the lower classes, usually through the Church, he or she became "elite."
The Enlightenment sought to apply the scientific method that had been so successful in Physics to all branches of knowledge. In the late 18th century saw the great Naturalists began the transformation from Natural History to Biology and Geology. But in the humanities you had people like Humboldt (also a naturalist) who also laid the groundwork for Anthropology. And the thing is, the success of cultural anthropology in the 20th century has been to realise to what extent culture influences the way we reason about and perceive the world (i.e., the rational and empirical basis of the Enlightenment approach are culturally determined). In this way, the scientific study of human culture shows that the Enlightenment is itself a culture and not universal. This is the truth at the core of the Postmodern reaction to the Enlightenment.
Now that people wedded to the Enlightenment values are beginning to realise what's going on, we might have a positive resolution that goes beyond both the Enlightenment and Postmodernism. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis? That would be a Hegelian happy ending... A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Secondly, I don't see how the fact that a significant population is for all intents and purposes uneducated on these values can matter. In the 18th century (or 19th century for that matter), universal education was nonexistent, yet those are commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Surely, today's near universal levels of education in rich societies compares very favorably?
While education is far more substantial in "fixing" ideals and values, cultural signposts serve to ground that knowledge as a shared experience. Without public recognition of values, they become a private experience. A sort of deregulation or outsourcing toward sporadic and local selfish charities.
One of the central tenets of the Enlightenment is its universality (since it is based on reason and empiricism, it is independent of culture). It can be argued (and has been on this site) that the Enlightenment ended up undermining itself by showing this tenet to be false.
It is easy to conflate the "Enlightenment" with "Modernity," which was one of its children. Another Enlightenment value was that social status should be based on merit, not birth. It is also easy to forget that "western liberal democracy" was not the only political offspring of the Enlightenment.
The other notable political offspring was the Soviet State. They embraced the same universal values as the others. It can be argued that they were much more effective in identifying and nurturing talent wherever it was found than were most "western democracies."
Universality proved very useful to the governance of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society. They had no use for nationalism or racism with so many nationalities and ethnicities. Religion was suppressed in the name of rationality. I am, of course, referring to the official dogma, not actual practice. Apples to apples, as it were.
Since 1989 we have seen a general retreat from universal values and a rise of nationalisms. This has become the context to the rise of market fundamentalism. But these universal values were never too well rooted anywhere, and were repeatedly overwhelmed by nationalism and racism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
The other notable political offspring was the Soviet State. They embraced the same universal values as the others.
By contrast, historical sciences require interpretation, because alternative histories cannot ever be observed. It's obvious that interpretation has a degree of arbitrariness, which the postmodernists have rightly pointed out.
Yet in Physics, postmodernism has no place. The primary authority is the experimental result, and the interpretation is merely a convenient summary which can always be replaced or ignored. It is a second tool for answering questions, which complements the experiment, which can always be performed.
Does your Hegelian dialectic count as universal if it applies only to a subset of human knowledge? ;-) -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
The primary authority is the experimental result, and the interpretation is merely a convenient summary which can always be replaced or ignored.
But, in addition, the history of physics is as much the history of the theories as it is the history of the experiments. Or, in fact, more about theory than about experiment, with key experiments punctuating the transitions between successive theories. Don't get me wrong, I still agree with Sokal when he said
I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. (If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be ``true'', why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it? I don't aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory.)
It is physics that represents a small subset of human knowledge. In fact, the more physics we know the less we need to know as the theories become more and more generally applicable. But for the last 30 years theoretical physics has become largely divorced from experiment. Instead of moving en masse to mesoscopic physics, theoretical high-energy physicists have marched onwards in pursuit of unification and quantum gravity with no experimental hints, with know (disastrous) results. The extent to which research in theoretical physics is directed by the likelihood of coming up with a publishable paper to put in one's CV for the next job placement 3 years down the line is positively postmodern.
Finally, "my" Hegelian dialectic is not about "Knowledge" but about structural narratives/frames/myths of a society. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Experiments need a theory to even describe what is going on, or if their result is surprising, why it is surprising.
Why publish actual data otherwise? It would be sufficient to publish the theories, and just claim that they work.
However, you're entirely right that the choice of which experiments are significant (and therefore are the ones that should be carried out and published) depends on the theories of the day. So the succession of experiments is guided by the history of the theories. Is that what you mean?
It is physics that represents a small subset of human knowledge. In fact, the more physics we know the less we need to know as the theories become more and more generally applicable. But for the last 30 years theoretical physics has become largely divorced from experiment.
The extent to which research in theoretical physics is directed by the likelihood of coming up with a publishable paper to put in one's CV for the next job placement 3 years down the line is positively postmodern.
Finally, "my" Hegelian dialectic is not about "Knowledge" but about structural narratives/frames/myths of a society.
good papers (though not all) will be cited, while the trash gets forgotten
When you do a literature search properly you quickly encounter the reality of the plagiarizing of reference lists. Papers are not quoted because they are good, but because they are quoted by other papers. Then again, you're right, just because they are listed in the references doesn't mean they have been read by the authors so, yes, the trash is forgotten.
for the last 30 years theoretical physics has become largely divorced from experiment. Now I think you're exaggerating too :)
it's far from clear that we're close to a GUT. And if we were, so what? We still wouldn't be able to calculate a lot of systems for fundamental mathematical reasons
The results speak for themselves, whatever they are.
At the risk of repeating myself, this diary is not about the experimental sciences, it's about the dominant narratives of society.
But, seriously, most modern experiments make no sense without a theory. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
(key word missing...) A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Information theoretically, the meaning is in the prior and the likelihood. The amount of surprise is, too, since entropy is an explicit function of the model, and for a given datapoint it can take any value as soon as you vary the model.
Is knowledge more than a collection of facts? Yes, but I would say it's a construct built on facts. If we lose the theories and the models, we can rebuild them, or substantially equivalent ones, from the facts. If we lose the facts, we can't just simulate new ones and call them real. -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
Within physics you have astrophysics or cosmology which are also historical.
And, to a certain extent, stationarity and ergodicity are model-dependent features.
It's not that "postmodern" "textual analysis" doesn't apply to physics, it is that when studying physics one has to take into account the repeatability.
So "repeatability" is a special quality that applies to a subset of human knowledge.
No, it is limited by the extent of repeatability. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
