Brilliant. Thank you. In a fun debate we once had for the benefit of our second year students, my brilliant colleague Thomas Munck once told our students that 'the Enlightenment was already postmodern', meaning that there were multiple 'Enlightenments' with their different and sometimes conflicting approaches to truth, the use of reason, religion, the role of government and so on....but this did not negate the existence of the Enlightenment. It was its very essence.
A very polite review but you nail it with: ". . . it is hard to imagine that any contemporary historiographical concepts would survive the sort of sharp prodding he here applies to “the Enlightenment.”" The book's argument doesn't arouse the slightest interest in me for this reason. All labels such as "Middle Ages" are constructions, often plainly post-hoc (as with "Middle Ages"). Some labels are more grounded in the period than others, but none are automatically invalid because they didn't circulate inside the period being described.
It's much more interesting to compare conceptions of the Enlightenment (e.g., Ernst Cassirer and Isaiah Berlin had entirely different conceptions) than to argue about whether there was such a thing as the Enlightenment.
It reminds me of the age-old debate about whether or not we can use the concept of genocide to describe events in the past, pre-20th century. Of course! Now the trick is to contextualise and to see what it did to the actors.
About this, I remember an interview of Raphael Lemkin himself who applied the concept to many events in the far-flung past.
In French historiography, we had this famous controversy/ debate between Porchnev and Mousnier, it all goes down to the EMIC vs. ETIC approaches.
'All labels such as "Middle Ages" are constructions, often plainly post-hoc (as with "Middle Ages"). Some labels are more grounded in the period than others, but none are automatically invalid because they didn't circulate inside the period being described.' Absolutely! The Renaissance, too...
Brilliant. Thank you. In a fun debate we once had for the benefit of our second year students, my brilliant colleague Thomas Munck once told our students that 'the Enlightenment was already postmodern', meaning that there were multiple 'Enlightenments' with their different and sometimes conflicting approaches to truth, the use of reason, religion, the role of government and so on....but this did not negate the existence of the Enlightenment. It was its very essence.
Thanks so much!
A very polite review but you nail it with: ". . . it is hard to imagine that any contemporary historiographical concepts would survive the sort of sharp prodding he here applies to “the Enlightenment.”" The book's argument doesn't arouse the slightest interest in me for this reason. All labels such as "Middle Ages" are constructions, often plainly post-hoc (as with "Middle Ages"). Some labels are more grounded in the period than others, but none are automatically invalid because they didn't circulate inside the period being described.
It's much more interesting to compare conceptions of the Enlightenment (e.g., Ernst Cassirer and Isaiah Berlin had entirely different conceptions) than to argue about whether there was such a thing as the Enlightenment.
It reminds me of the age-old debate about whether or not we can use the concept of genocide to describe events in the past, pre-20th century. Of course! Now the trick is to contextualise and to see what it did to the actors.
About this, I remember an interview of Raphael Lemkin himself who applied the concept to many events in the far-flung past.
In French historiography, we had this famous controversy/ debate between Porchnev and Mousnier, it all goes down to the EMIC vs. ETIC approaches.
Thanks!!
'All labels such as "Middle Ages" are constructions, often plainly post-hoc (as with "Middle Ages"). Some labels are more grounded in the period than others, but none are automatically invalid because they didn't circulate inside the period being described.' Absolutely! The Renaissance, too...
George Santayana, "Skepticism and Animal Faith" (1923)
Ch.1 "THERE IS NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM"
A philosopher is compelled to follow the maxim of
epic poets and to plunge in medias res. The origin
of things, if things have an origin, cannot be revealed
to me, if revealed at all, until I have travelled very
far from it, and many revolutions of the sun must
precede my first dawn. The light as it appears hides
the candle. Perhaps there is no source of things at
all, no simpler form from which they are evolved, but
only an endless succession of different complexities.
In that case nothing would be lost by joining the
procession wherever one happens to come upon it,
and following it as long as one's legs hold out. Every
one might still observe a typical bit of it ; he would
not have understood anything better if he had seen
more things ; he would only have had more to explain.
The very notion of understanding or explaining any
thing would then be absurd ; yet this notion is drawn
from a current presumption or experience to the effect
that in some directions at least things do grow out of
simpler things : bread can be baked, and dough and
fire and an oven are conjoined in baking it. Such an
episode is enough to establish the notion of origins and
explanations, without at all implying that the dough
and the hot oven are themselves primary facts. A
philosopher may accordingly perfectly well undertake
to find episodes of evolution in the world : parents
with children, storms with shipwrecks, passions with
tragedies. If he begins in the middle he will still begin
at the beginning of something, and perhaps as much
at the beginning of things as he could possibly begin.
On the other hand, this whole supposition may be
wrong. Things may have had some simpler origin,
or may contain simpler elements. In that case it will
be incumbent on the philosopher to prove this fact ;
that is, to find in the complex present objects
evidence of their composition out of simples. But
in this proof also he would be beginning in the middle ;
and he would reach origins or elements only at the
end of his analysis.