The Enlightenment's central "key word": the human faculty held capable of understanding, and progressively mastering, the world.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Philosophical movements have moods, and the Enlightenment's, as Shore reads it, is exultant: reason worshipped and trusted, disenchantment greeted with joy rather than regret.
Put simply Shore: philosophical movements have moods. The Enlightenment's was elated: it worshiped and trusted reason, and greeted the fading of magic and miracles ("disenchantment") with joy rather than regret.
"Sapere aude," dare to know: Kant's motto for enlightenment asks for courage, the nerve to reason for oneself rather than let a priest or a book decide.
Where to read it Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (1784), opening paragraph.
Against the decentering worked by Nietzsche's genealogy, Foucault says, the sovereign-subject tradition set a search for an original foundation, making reason mankind's telos and demanding perpetual return to it.
Put simply Foucault: against the decentering of the self by Nietzsche's "genealogy," the defenders of the sovereign subject sought an original foundation: reason as humanity's goal, to which thought must always return.
Enlightenment reason was possible only once madness had been defined: there is no reason without an unreason to set it against, which makes the asylum the Enlightenment's dark side.
Put simply Foucault: the Enlightenment's idea of reason needed an idea of madness to define itself against. Without unreason there is no reason. That makes the asylum the Enlightenment's dark side.
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
WeberThe Enlightenment disenchanted the world (Weber's Entzauberung): belief in miracles, mythical beings, and powers beyond human grasp was draining out of how people understood things. L2 · 9:50
ShorePhilosophical movements have moods, and the Enlightenment's, as Shore reads it, is exultant: reason worshipped and trusted, disenchantment greeted with joy rather than regret. L2 · 6:21
Frames Weber's disenchantment thesis as the specific historical process underlying the Enlightenment's characteristic confident mood.
FoucaultEnlightenment reason was possible only once madness had been defined: there is no reason without an unreason to set it against, which makes the asylum the Enlightenment's dark side. L21 · 27:08
ShoreShore sees parallels between reason's dependence on madness, Beauvoir's self-definition through an other and Wolff's Eastern Europe, invented as the West's Enlightenment contrast. L21 · 27:45
Shore generalizes reason's need for madness into a pattern of identity formed against an Other.
Lévi-StraussClassical structuralism, as it comes through Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, charts many cultural relations as binary oppositions: cooked against raw, low against high, cold against hot. L19 · 43:52
FoucaultEnlightenment reason was possible only once madness had been defined: there is no reason without an unreason to set it against, which makes the asylum the Enlightenment's dark side. L21 · 27:08
Shore calls Foucault's claim that reason required unreason a very structuralist argument in which the structuralist binaries come back.
Terms that appear in the same claims.