Romanticism Vs. Enlightenment

Neither. I'm deconstructing your summary of that particular notion of Nietzsche's, taken apart and by itself. "Extreme" is a relative term, and so is moderation; even moderation can be taken to an extreme (or several, even!), and any particular behaviour, pattern or thing that is marked as extreme can seem moderate in comparison to something even more extreme. Even when dealing with the purest form of extreme, infinites, well, some infinites are larger than others, and for every infinite, you can find another infinite that contains it fully!

As it applies to societies managing people, and people managing their emotions, compulsions, and circumstances, any well-designed system that manages random distributions should have built-in ways of making the best use out of statistical outliers. "When people accept they're cogs in the system, give up free will, conform"? Your "fee will" is accounted for, and you'll only be asked to conform on some minimal points that are in your best interest as per The Golden Rule. We have plenty of security systems, buffers and safety nets in place, so as long as you aren't hurting anyone but yourself, go wild!

The previous paragraph may have been half-sarcastic.

That's a really interesting statement. Can you elaborate a bit further?

It's math. Just look up "sizes of infinity", there's a bunch of popularizations out there for the non-mathy people.

Yeah, like the set of all positive numbers is infinite. Yet the set that contains all positive and negative numbers is a "larger" infinite, completely containing the former and then some.

More entertainingly, the set of natural numbers and that of positive rational numbers are exactly of the same size. This is because a function can be defined so that to each natural number corresponds one rational number, and vice-versa. So even though between every two natural numbers there's an infinity of rationals, and between every two rationals there's yet another infinity of rationals, the set of natural numbers and that of rational ones are of the same size.

I love this shit.

But on the other hand there really are more reals then counting numbers.

If this weren't true there'd be a function that could create an infinite list of the reals between 1 and 0. But no matter what that list is, there'll be a number who's nth digit after the decimal point is different than the nth digit of the nth real number. Proof by contradiction.

Man, reals keep it real, knowhamsayin'?

All the way back to DP's post 171 on the previous page. Thank you for your patience.

"Huh? No, liberalism is basically pure Enlightenment"

Lets check to make sure we are using the same terms the same way. When I have been referring to "Liberalism" I meant the American Moderate Left of Center, not the classic European "Liberalism" that followed Absolute Monarchy. I think this might clear up some confusion. Because, you know, no contemporary American Liberal follows Bentham on anything.

As for Romanticism and Progress, I want to make a distinction between progress in science and knowledge, and progress in social justice. Equal Opportunity for all is all a enlightenment conservative needs- unequal outcomes follow naturally from that, and most Enlightenment philosophers were content with that, including Locke and Bentham. This wont work for more Romantic Philosophers such as Proudhon, Gramsci, or Bakunin. Equality of outcomes was what they were striving for. Today we dont look for just identical treatment for everyone- Positive Freedom or "Freedom To" includes access to all the social resources each individual needs to achieve their true potential. How romantic is that?

Mills is another centrist like Kant. His conception of Liberty as restrictions on the power of the governing class was a reaction against Rousseau's idea of the General Will, in which there is one coherent will governing all factions within society. According to Rousseau, it might be possible to set up a structure that governs according to the General Will, and therefore individual factions do not need to be represented. According to Mills, that's impossible. Mills was very concerned about minority rights, and the possibility of a Tyranny of the Majority. Society is divided into factions who have irreconcilable differences of interest. These need to be balanced against each other. Then again, Mills framework also rejects someone like Hobbes, who thought that society needed a strong father-figure at the top to knock heads together and make everyone work in societies best interest.

As for Frankenstein, again we must distinguish between progress in science and social institutions, against progress in social values and the opportunity for individuals to express themselves, which are not the same thing, and often act in opposition to one another. It is a common romantic notion that the more powerful societies institutions become, the more suppressed the individual will be. Shelley is expressing caution regarding the power science and knowledge give some people to oppress or exploit others, but she is also proposing that this is often the result of people choosing not to fulfill their moral obligations, as in a creator toward his creation (as I think Handle pointed out). Society will progress when people place the needs of other people over their own ambition to power. That's a call to social progress, not a rejection of it.

Thoreau is exactly the same- he rejected many social rules and institutional roles that people impose on themselves- but he embraced not simply a solitary return to nature but a more natural way for people to relate to one another (i.e. ""I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government"). Again, he isn't rejecting social progress at all. Most anarchists can be described that way.

If you look carefully at my description of Enlightenment Political Philosophy as an arena of individual competition in which the rights of the propertied classes are protected, you will see that Rawls does not fit that at all. By my definition, he isnt an Enlightenment Philosopher, nor a Romantic one, he's another centrist. I have a great deal of sympathy for his system, but I dont think he was all that interested in the development of science or objective knowledge.

Overall, I think I make more distinctions than you do. You seem to divide everyone into two classes: Enlightenment or Romantic, while I include a center. As for conservatism, I'm pretty sure that they mostly think modern society sucks eggs, and want to go back to the past, like 100 years in the past.

John Locke requires an entire post to himself, and I'm too tired right now. I'll just leave you with a few choice quotes, and leave a more detailed analysis for later:

"Government has no other end than the preservation of property"

"The supreme power can not take from any man part of his property without his consent"; and

"And what is the best for mankind? That the people should always be exposed to the boundless will of tyranny, or that the rules should sometimes be liable to be opposed when they grow exorbitant in the use of their power and employ it for the destruction and not the preservation of the properties of their people?"

You say a lot more, but I just cant get to it right now. I'll try for tomorrow.

edited 1st Jan '15 6:29:28 PM by demarquis

I assumed you were referring to social liberalism as it appears in the US, which is basically social democracy by any other name and the inheritance of Mills and Kant.

Right, and the Enlightenment would often conflate those, while Romantics critique both.

...Those are all very Enlightenment figures... I mean, Proudhon even had a romantic counterpart in Stirner.

...Not at all. The romantics were never on about freedom. The romantics were on about living life and living it great. It is the Enlightenment that was about autonomy in all its variations.

...Right, just like modern social liberals.

Right, and all of this finds its way into Rawls and modern social liberalism.

Shelly wasn't making a call for social progress at all. Like, as the son of an anarchist and a feminist, she certainly would've loved to see great change happen, but not once did she package this within a narrative of progress, and every narrative of progress she did present was presented negatively.

I mean, it's the Enlightenment which tries to package everything as "progress", while romantics don't bother with that bs. Calling for restraint to social institutions isn't calling for social progress. Social progress is a very specific conception of how change to social institutions functions, not all change to social institutions. Applying that to romantics is putting a square peg in a round hole.

Yes, and? That's, again, not coextensive with social progress. I mean, he was calling for a return to nature, not a progression to something new. He didn't conceive of what he was calling for as moving forward, but retreating backwards away from the social institutions created by social progress.

And I was saying you're wrong about Enlightenment Political Philosophy.

This doesn't even make sense, though. There isn't a spectrum with Enlightenment on one side and Romanticism on the other. There are romantics who think like romantics, there are Enlightenment thinkers who think in ways rooted in the Enlightenment, and then there are people who don't fit into either who think a different way, even if they may borrow a lot from romantics and the Enlightenment. But there isn't a spectrum and there is no "center" between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.

...Do you even know what conservatism is? Or read anything by a conservative ever? Or even paid attention to conservative politicians? I mean, I don't see conservative politicians who are calling for the end to women's suffrage or anything like that, so they most definitely aren't trying to bring us back 100 years.

Right, and this resulted from how he conceived of the development of the social contract. He thought it came through people fighting over what property is theirs and what property is the other person's, so they would create a government to draw the dividing line and preserve their property, but not interfere in much else beyond that and the protection of their life and their liberty. But he also put things as more important than property. Heck, property, for him, is more akin to how modern socialists conceive of property, anyway, given that it was about how much you could possibly be able to use and stuff.

Which indicate that he thought that the state taking from the individual without them buying into the social contract would be wrong, not that he thought property was the most important. As the quote of his I brought up pointed out, he thought no one could lose their freedom to another person because of property.

Seriously, this is almost as bad a reading of Locke as most right-libertarians have.

Isn't a person who has views like that called a reactionary? And I'm sure that definition won't fit a Liberal Conservative or a One-Nation Conservative. Not all Conservatism is reactionary.

By the way, I assume you're both talking about John Stuart Mill, not Mills?

edited 2nd Jan '15 12:21:55 AM by Greenmantle

...Yes, I meant Mill. I don't know why I called him Mills. It should be obvious from me juxtaposing him with Bentham.

edited 2nd Jan '15 12:25:31 AM by deathpigeon

Bentham: nutty as a fruitcake. But, in a Crazy Awesome way.

edited 2nd Jan '15 1:19:25 AM by Euodiachloris

Bentham: Literally embalmed in the University College London watching us forever.

@ deathpigeon: It was obvious, but it helps to be sure. Precision helps in debates like this, I find.

edited 2nd Jan '15 1:55:23 AM by Greenmantle

Yeah. It was a mistake on my part.

Another attempt to sum the topic up in under ten minutes:

That video really makes romanticism seem like a mere spite reaction to modernity. Which is my problem with it. Instead of improving the situation, they are against everything out of spite and reject the good stuff of enlightenment with the bad stuff. They create a false dichotomy. But then, improving things and actually wanting to succeed would be enlightenment again.

And now after lurking the thread for a few days. I decide to join in and necrobump the thread.

I've learned a lot from this thread, namely that the two terms/movements aren't as clear-cut as I thought. It also seems that in light of the above video and the discussion about how every political party but in the far edges are enlightened, It seems to me that people in general seem inherently enlightened, for they are willing to better oneself and some are willing to look towards the future and plan ahead a lot.

I still think that Romanticism emphasizes the Past, Emotions and Nature, and Enlightenment likewise does the same to Science, the Future and Logic.

However there seems to another factor. What both sides see as a slippery slope to Dystopia. The Enlightened claims that ignorance leads to Dystopia, while Romanticists claim that it is complacency, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this (and topics like technological singularities)

Well, nowadays we have both a lot of ignorance and a lot fo complacency, that's for sure.

I'd rather pick stuff from both sides rather than assume myself to be one or the other. I don't want to be put in a box or group, just because I agree with some of the ideas.

I think the past/future emphasis cuts through both movements. Certainly there are people who romanticize social progress, and people who use objectivity as a way of preventing change.