[Paleopsych] 2blowhards.com: The Scottish Enlightenment
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The Scottish Enlightenment
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001710.html
In which a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions,
interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics,
evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these
days, and lousy educations.
October 19, 2004
The Scottish Enlightenment
Michael Blowhard writes:
Dear Blowhards --
The Enlightenment, eh? What a mixed legacy. On the one hand: clarity
and progress. On the other: arrogance and the evaporation of meaning.
Spin the Enlightenment's implications out, and you wind up in a
tangle, wrapped up in the bind we're told we necessarily struggle with
today: po-mo, deconstruction, the crisis of "liberalism," bizarre
buildings ... And we're led to believe that all this is inevitable --
that we can't have the blessings of Reason without the curses and
agonies that follow in its wake.
My hunch about why we feel the post-Enlightenment pinch as acutely as
we do is that the Enlightenment most of us know is the French
Enlightenment. And those French, forever pushing things to absurd
extremes. A Frenchman is apparently incapable of saying, "Hey, cool:
Reason!" and then adding it to his repertory. No, he has to believe in
it, make a substitute religion of it, live it out to its logical
conclusions ... And what does Reason lead to when it's pushed
fanatically out as far as it can go? Barrenness, cafe existentialism,
suicide, bizarre buildings, [99]Catherine Breillat movies. (A small
joke: I love many of Breillat's movies.)
But there was another Enlightenment altogether, one that had its feet
well-planted on the ground -- the Scottish Englightenment. In 50ish
years, from circa 1700 to the mid-1700s, Edinburgh transformed itself
from a religion-oppressed backwater into one of the happening-ist
cities in Europe. Giants walked Edinburgh's streets: Thomas Reid,
Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, many others.
Most of these men were "natural philosophers," taking on economics,
science, aesthetics, psychology, politics, and philosophy itself.
These weren't wacko poseurs or radical theorists. They were practical
men who were respectful of everyday experience (even religion); many
were in close contact with the great Scottish scientists of the era.
The Scots also maintained close connections with the French, but
Scotland's Enlightenment had a very different tone than France's did.
It was grounded in common sense and history, and had a modest and
empirical spirit. And the Scotsmen's attitude towards Reason was very
different than the froggy attitude. The Scots seemed to consider
Reason to be a marvelous tool, and nothing more. Sharpen it; respect
it; make much use of it -- but don't look to Reason to deliver any
Final Truth. And don't expect to turn up anything of much use or
interest by investigating the nature of Reason itself. What does a
tool have to tell you about life? A tool's a tool. It's up to you to
put it to work.
What the Scotsmen lack in radical-chic they more than make up for
(IMHO) in solidity and usefulness. They keep Reason in perspective,
always remembering that life itself is far more important. No
surprise, then, that this was by all accounts a cheery, social,
sunny-spirited, outgoing scene, one that brings to mind such convivial
18th century novels as "Tom Jones."
Bizarrely, this era began being thought of as "the Scottish
Englightenment" and being studied for its own sake only 40 or so years
ago. I'm by no means a scholar on the topic, but I've read a fair
amount of Hume and Smith, I've sampled some of the others, and I've
read (and can recommend) two good recent books about the era:
[100]this one and [101]this one. But still I was knocked out when I
learned about the era and its thinkers. Post-Enlightenment
stupid-knots in my brain relaxed their grip; sensible thoughts took
the place of tormented ones. I sighed with relief and wondered: "Why
didn't anyone tell me about this long ago?" I wonder if other people
as puzzled by our supposedly inevitable post-Enlightenment predicament
might not get as healthy a kick out of a quick visit with these
Scotsmen as I did.
What made me pull these few paragraphs together was running across
[102]David Denby's essay about The Scottish Enlightenment in this
week's New Yorker. Some excerpts from Denby's excellent piece:
The learned Scots were remarkably unlike the French philosophes;
indeed, they were unlike any other group of philosophers that ever
existed....
In the Scottish group ... there was little of the bristling,
charged, and exclusionary fervor of the Diderot-dAlembert circle;
or of the ruthless atmosphere found in Germany in the group that
included Fichte, the Schelling brothers, and Hegel; or of the
conscious glamour of the existentialists in postwar Paris. The
Scots vigorously disagreed with one another, but they lacked the
temperament for the high moral drama of quarrels, renunciations,
and reconciliation. Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, along with Adam
Ferguson and Thomas Reid, were all widely known, but none of them
were remotely cult figures in the style of Hegel, Marx, Emerson,
Wittgenstein, Sartre, or Foucault. To an astonishing degree, the
men supported one anothers projects and publications, which they
may have debated at a club that included amateurs (say,
poetry-writing doctors, or lawyers with an interest in science) or
in the fumy back room of some dark Edinburgh tavern. In all, the
group seems rather like an erudite version of Dickenss chattering
and benevolent Pickwick Club ...
The Scots were conservatives and radicals at the same time. They
prized social order, and peace and quiet; they also sought
intellectual revolutionnew ways of looking at how the mind works,
how morality works, and how we live in society ... They could not
imagine, and did not desire, civil society without religion. But
they wanted to ease God out of scientific research and out of
political and social life, too. And they wanted to naturalize
moralityto locate the foundations of morals somewhere else than in
revelation and fear of eternal damnation ...
Wisdom, for Hume, begins with the acknowledgment of uncertaintyof
the limits of what we know ... The power of reason to prove much of
what we know is weak, and Hume denied that our beliefs about the
world could be ascertained with anything like scientific certainty
... Hume was fascinated by what we would call consciousness, but he
always leads us back to experience, which is the arena, the test,
the goal ...
Sociability was what mattered, and in their writings the world,
teeming yet measurable, is always with them ... The view is
masculine, conservative, hedonistic: good fellows write poetry,
study science and philosophy, do business, practice law, and gather
at the end of the day for a drink, and lets not have any nonsense
about austerity or purity ...
[103]Here's a brief Wikipedia overview. [104]Here's The Adam Smith
Institute. [105]Here's The International Adam Smith Society.
[106]Here's The Hume Society; the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy's
[107]entry on Hume is a good one. [108]Here's The Adam Ferguson
Society; [109]here's a good intro to Ferguson. [110]Here's a good
quick online intro to the Scottish Enlightenment generally.
Reading Adam Smith himself, I was struck by what a respectful,
trenchant, and complex thinker he was -- anything but the
simple-minded apostle for corporatism and greed that he's sometimes
taken to be today. Passages in his works anticipate Hayek and chaos
theory; other passages anticipate Marx in their vision of how
deadening division-of-labor-style labor can be. So I also recommend
[111]a new essay by Sam Fleischacker for the Library of Economics and
Liberty. In it, Fleischacker argues that Adam Smith is misunderstood
when he's made out to be Mr. Johnny One-Note on the subject of
self-interest:
Far more important to Smith's work is the belief that ordinary
people normally understand their own interests without help from
politicians or professional philosophers. The distinctive mark of
Smith's thought is his view of human cognition, not of human
motivation: he is far more willing than practically any of his
contemporaries to endorse the ability of ordinary people to know
what they need to know in life.
Why do we tend to overvalue French thought? And why do we tend to
undervalue the thoughts of sensible people like this Scottish crowd?
Is it the glamor factor? Radical posturing of the froggy sort often
does have a certain elegance and chic. But maybe our profs and
intellectuals genuinely believe that art, beauty, and decent political
reform simply can't arise out of a well-grounded consciousness.
Best,
Michael
posted by Michael at [112]October 19, 2004
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Comments
Ye Jacobites By Name
--Robert Burns 1791
Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear, give an
ear,
Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear,
Ye Jacobites by name,
Your fautes I will proclaim,
Your doctrines I maun blame, you shall hear.
What is Right, and What is Wrang, by the law,
by the law?
What is Right and What is Wrang by the law?
What is Right, and What is Wrang?
A short sword, and a lang,
A weak arm and a strang, for to draw.
What makes heroic strife, famed afar, famed
afar?
What makes heroic strife famed afar?
What makes heroic strife?
To whet th' assassin's knife,
Or hunt a Parent's life, wi' bluidy war?
Then let your schemes alone, in the state, in
the state,
Then let your schemes alone in the state,
Then let your schemes alone,
Adore the rising sun,
And leave a man undone, to his fate.
Posted by: [113]ricpic on October 19, 2004 12:30 PM
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Why do intellectuals overvalue the French Enlightenment? Partially
from its immense flattery of the intellectual ego--Reason can solve
all problems, and if you possess a greater share of Reason than the
hoi polloi, you are superior to them. The Scottish Englightenment, on
the other hand, doesn't make such grandiose claims about Reason's
power and recognizes that most people have enough Reason to solve
their problems passably well.
Also, intellectuals suffer from the same psychological flaws evolution
has built into all of us. Specifically:
(1) a moral busybody streak. In the philosophes' utopia, society would
be so understood and engineered that everyone (else) does exactly what
the intellectual wants. There's an evo-psych benefit to making other
people's behavior predictable--it means I have to think less about how
to manage and manipulate them. "Predictable," though, can still mean
"not what I want." Even better is if everyone behaves the way I want
them to--this gives me the further egoboo (and lighter cognitive load)
of knowing I'm right and I don't have to rethink what I want.
The Scots and their philosophical descendants--Hayek, Popper, small-l
libertarians, et al.--recognized most of what is good about social
living is self-organized, and were highly doubtful that grandiose
social engineering projects could work. If one is looking for an
intellectual justification for one's moral busybodydom, the Scots
don't provide it.
(2) the urge to dissolve one's ego in a collective. The philosophes
presented a vision of a transcendent collective--the utopia to come
after "the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last
priest"--as well as a temporal collective--the salons and cafes--where
one had to labor to bring the transcendent collective to fruition.
(The religious analogy is intended: think of the New Jerusalem the
early Christians would see if they remained faithful to their
oppressed churches). Such a vision is seductive, both in traditional
religions and in modern, "secular" ones like Marxism/Communism,
Fascism, architectural modernism, avant-gardeism in arts and letters,
environmentalism, etc.
The Scots only provided the temporal collective--pubs where people
could debate and agree to disagree. The transcendent collective is off
the table; if it even exists, we won't know until we get there, and
what it is may surprise us.
Posted by: [114]Raymund on October 19, 2004 01:49 PM
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Alan Charles Kors did not do enough about the Scottish Enlightenment
for his, otherwise, fabulous lectures for the Teaching Company. If
anyone has any clout with Kors, badger him into doing a series on it
ASAP!
Posted by: [115]Michael Serafin on October 19, 2004 02:09 PM
[plugdiv.gif]
Ricpic -- I didn't know that poem, or at least didn't remember it.
Pretty much sums things up, though, doesn't it? Thanks for passing it
along.
Raymund -- You packed as much punch into your handful of paragraphs as
Denby did into his piece. "Immense flattery of the intellectual ego"
-- that's really good. I'll be stealing, er borrowing, your ideas and
insights. Thanks in advance.
Michael -- I was a little bugged too by the way Kors seemed
overentranced by the French, but like you thought the series was great
anyway. You're right: someone should urge Kors and the Teaching
Company to get on the Scottish Enlightenment bandwagon soon -- or else
the Portable Professors will get there first.
Posted by: [116]Michael Blowhard on October 19, 2004 04:30 PM
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A couple of additional points: According to Bernard Bailyn's
"Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," the Scottish
Enlightenment played a huge role among American thinkers in 1776 and
1787, especially more obscure figures like Hutcheson.
Also, Darwinism, Britain's greatest intellectual contribution of the
the next century, is clearly a 19th Century outgrowth of the Scottish
Enlightenment and its counterparts in northern England. Darwin
formulated his theory of natural selection shortly after reading Adam
Smith and the economist Thomas Malthus. Alfred Russel Wallace, who
independently discovered the theory of natural selection in 1857, did
so immediately after awakening from a Malaria fever dream about
Malthus' ideas, which he had been reading when he fell asleep.
Both JM Keynes and SG Gould have remarked on Darwinism as an outgrowth
of the Smith tradition in economics.
Posted by: [117]Steve Sailer on October 19, 2004 05:18 PM
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Thought you had been reading Gertrude Himmelfarb's "The Road to
Modernity", when I saw your title "Englightenment". I may have missed
a comment on the book.I think she gives a wider view of the British
Enlightenment. Pete
Posted by: [118]peter on October 20, 2004 07:16 AM
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How come we English get squeezed out? Ever heard of Newton, Locke,
Priestley, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Defoe, Pope, Paine? See Roy
Porter's book "The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of
the British Enlightenment".
Posted by: [119]Mick H on October 20, 2004 08:25 AM
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The Scottish Enlightenment is underrated because it celebrated
bourgeois values. Modern intellectuals want radicalism and activism,
and have been that way ever since the French Revolution.
In their sobriety and reasonableness, Smith and Hume are a constant
rebuke to the search for romantic intellectualism that has
characterized the bohemians of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Posted by: [120]jn on October 20, 2004 11:59 AM
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Steve -- Thanks, I've always wondered whether I should give the Bailyn
a try. Now I know I should.
Peter, Mick H -- I don't know why but the Brit Englightenment never
hit me as hard as the Scottish, though I suppose it'd have behooved me
to mention that. Maybe the Scots seemed more ... I dunno, earthy or
something. A nicer antidote to the French. And, hey, I skipped the
German Enlightenment too.
JN -- That's well-put, tks, and the emphasis on the bourgeois is
important. I wonder if there's any way to balance what's of worth in
what bohemia has to offer (mainly certain kinds of beauty) with a
wariness about buying the entire silly package. I hope so.
Posted by: [121]Michael Blowhard on October 20, 2004 12:47 PM
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The Scots (and Brits and subsequently Americans) emphasized process
over theory. An approach that works, but doesn't resonate like the
mellow soundings of the philosophes.
In "An Anglosphere Primer" (via Chicago Boyz), James C. Bennett extols
strong civil society as the glue holding together Anglosphere
democracy. French intellectuals mouthed the democratic words without
the music.
"These intellectuals called this thing democracy, but they
subsequently focused attention on their model (and its
misunderstandings) rather than the essence of the thing they actually
admired."
Steve - In the early eighties, in a French lit course at UC Santa
Cruz, our prof opened by asking who were the three most influential
thinkers of the modern era. She - arms crossed and confident in her
judgment - was sitting in the catbird seat with the Goods. Who did we
think was tops? I - anglophile Scots-American bourgeois - essayed a
guess: Darwin.
To her credit, that one made her think. Her choices, though, were
Freud, Marx and Nietzsche.
Posted by: [122]Robert Bruce on October 20, 2004 03:02 PM
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". . . Hume adopts Berkeley's arguments showing our inability to
access some external world behind our perceptions."
(http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/h/humeepis.htm)
"He dismissed standard accounts of causality and argued that our
conceptions of cause/effect relations are grounded in habits of
thinking, rather than in the perception of causal forces in the
external world itself."
(http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/h/humelife.htm)
Without calling it so, Hume concluded that there is a problem of
induction, which, ever since, has been a problem for philosophers of
science: the [p]roblem of justifying the inductive inference from the
observed to the unobserved.
(http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article?tocId=9367935&query=Induction&c
t=David; you can find Karl Popper on it here:
http://dieoff.org/page126.htm)
As David Stove has pointed out ". . . the influence of Hume on
20th-century philosophy of science in general is in fact so great that
it is scarcely possible to exaggerate it. He looms like a colossus
over both of the main tendencies in philosophy of science in the
present century: the logical positivist one, and the irrationalist
one. His empiricism, his insistence on the fallibility of induction,
and on the thesis which follows from those two, of the permanent
possibility of the falsity of any scientific theory, are fundamental
planks in the platform of both of these schools of thought. Where the
two schools separate is that the irrationalists further accept, while
the logical positivists reject, Hume's further, sceptical, thesis
about induction: that the premise of an inductive argument is no
reason to believe its conclusion. This is why the logical positivists,
in the 1940's and '50's set about constructing what they called
`confirmation-theory', `non-deductive logic', `the theory of logical
probability', or `inductive logic': a branch of logic which, while
being consistent with empiricism and inductive fallibilism, would
allow scientific theories to be objects of rational belief without
being certain. The irrationalists, on the other hand, being Humean
sceptics and not merely fallibilists about induction, deny the
possibility of any such theory . . . ."
In the sharpest possible contrast to all this, the influence of Hume
on philosophy of science in the 19th century was but slight. For this
extraordinary reversal in the importance attached to Hume's philosophy
of science, the historical reason is obvious enough, at least in broad
terms. The crucial event was that one which for almost two hundred
years had been felt to be impossible, but which nevertheless took
place near the start of this century: the fall of the Newtonian empire
in physics. This catastrophe, and the period of extreme turbulence in
physics it inaugurated, changed the entire climate of philosophy of
science. Almost all philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, it
was now clear, has enormously exaggerated the certainty and the extent
of scientific knowledge. What was needed, evidently, was a far less
optimistic philosophy of science, a rigorously fallibilist philosophy,
which would ensure that such fearful hubris as had been incurred in
connection with Newtonian physics should never be incurred again.
Well, the very thing needed was lying at hand, though long neglected;
and Hume, 150 years after his death, finally and fully came into his
own.
Thus the revival of Hume's philosophy of science in this century was a
movement of retreat from that confidence in science which was so high,
and constantly rising, in the two preceding centuries, and which had
proved to be misplaced precisely where it was highest. This retreat
was general, all empiricist philosophers taking part in it. [Karl]
Popper and his followers are simply those with whom the retreat turned
into a rout. They fell back all the way to Hume: not just to his
fallibilism but to his scepticism about induction; and hence (since
they were empiricists) to his scepticism in general about the
unobserved.
Their only object was, and has remained, to ensure that no scientific
theory should ever again become the object of over-confident belief;
since only in that way can it be guaranteed that such a fall as
overtook Newtonian pride will never be repeated. Now, it was the
belief that a scientific theory can be certain, which had made that
fall possible. So it must be re-affirmed, with Hume, that a scientific
theory is never deducible from the observational evidence for it.
(http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Facility/4118/dcs/popper/ch
apter-03.html)
After Hume had reached these conclusions about our knowledge of the
external world, the nature of cause and effect, and the problem of
induction, among others, he wrote:
"The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections
in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am
ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion
even as more probable or likely than another. [1.4.7.8]"
(http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/h/humeepis.htm#H3)
However, [m]ost fortunately it happens that, since reason is incapable
of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose,
and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by
relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation and lively impression
of my senses which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a
game of back-gammon, I converse and I am merry with my friends; and
when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these
speculations, they appear so cold and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I
cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further. (Treatise,
Book I, Part IV, Section VII, p. 269 in the Selby-Bigge edition)
(http://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/induction.html)
Cordially,
Dave Lull
Posted by: [123]Dave Lull on October 20, 2004 03:23 PM
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Superb essays on the ethical theories of the Scottish Enlightenment
appear in Alasdair MacIntyre's _Whose Justice? Which Rationality?_
(1988). See especially ch. XII, "The Augustinian and Aristotelian
Background to the Scottish Enlightenment" and ch. XIV, "Hutcheson on
Justice and Practical Responsibility."
Posted by: [124]Francis Morrone on October 20, 2004 03:25 PM
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"Steve - In the early eighties, in a French lit course at UC Santa
Cruz, our prof opened by asking who were the three most influential
thinkers of the modern era... Her choices, though, were Freud, Marx
and Nietzsche."
If she asked, "Who were the most _right_ thinkers?" then it would be
hard to beat Hume, Smith, and Darwin.
Posted by: [125]Steve Sailer on October 20, 2004 08:05 PM
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Michael -
You should definitely give the Bailyn a try. I'm a simple man, I don't
know much, but I do know that.
Especially since we now live in a pamphleteering age very similar to
the one he distills in his first few chapters.
Also, his distinction between power and liberty parallels yours
between "the political class" and "the rest of us".
A fine book.
Posted by: [126]Brian on October 20, 2004 10:05 PM
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Thanks to all for tips, info, thoughts, etc. I'm just a dabbler and a
fan, so it's great to go on learning.
Posted by: [127]Michael Blowhard on October 21, 2004 12:17 AM
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Thank you for the Buchan recommendation -- I hadn't realized that he
had a new book out. Have you read Frozen Desire, his book about money?
Worth giving a try.
Posted by: [128]Steve Casburn on November 1, 2004 03:52 AM
References
99. http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001700.html#001700
100. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1841581518/qid=1097957090/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/104-8379273-2271924?v=glance&s=books
101. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060558881/qid=1097957090/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-8379273-2271924?v=glance&s=books
102. http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?041011crat_atlarge
103. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_enlightenment
104. http://www.adamsmith.org/
105. http://www.adamsmithsociety.net/
106. http://www.humesociety.org/
107. http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/h/humelife.htm
108. http://www.logan.com/afi/
109. http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/ferguson.htm
110. http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/scottish.htm
111. http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2004/FleischackerSmith.html
112. http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001710.html#001710
113. mailto:sutta at adelphia.net
114. mailto:kumarbis_tx at yahoo.com
115. mailto:michael_serafin at hotmail.com
116. http://www.2blowhards.com/
117. http://www.isteve.com/
118. mailto:p.dible at worldnet.att.net
119. mailto:mick.hartley at btinternet.com
120. mailto:jn at mailinator.com
121. http://www.2blowhards.com/
122. mailto:lutosus at hotmail.com
123. mailto:dave_lull at yahoo.com
124. mailto:fm27 at nyu.edu
125. http://www.iSteve.com/
126. mailto:thechases at worldnet.att.net.die.spammers.die
127. http://www.2blowhards.com/
128. http://www.io.com/~casburn/blog/
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