Mitya’s Reviews > The Enlightenment > Status Update

The age of anarchic individualism that Fichte foresaw would give way to a fourth age of action where the enlightened individual would realize himself in proportion to his surrender to state/collective will. History advanced by conflict would constitute the chosen vehicle of the historical process. German nationalism/Nazism/Marxism came to develop.

Fichte thought the course of history could be determined through the deductive reasoning of Descartes. In the beginning, man's reason and rational conduct was intuitive, before splitting off into two groups, one rational, one barbarous. The second stage of history was victory over the barbarous. Third was reason's revolt against this authority. The fourth age, reason as science, subordination to collective will.

Roman Catholic reactionaries saw the French Revolution as a warning that everyone should go back. Burke saw it as proof the British should stay put. German Idealists tried to go forward instead. Fichte saw the external world as not real in the way in which the noumenal world of ideas was. The only reality was that of the mind. The individual mind was part of a universal mind.

Rousseau's formed a the starting point for patriotism, one being civic alongside an aggressive assertion of interests externally. Since obligation was created by society, the community was the source of law and morals. There could be no appeal made to that beyond the collective interest of society. The generation before 1789 saw a decline in cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment in general.

The movement away from Old Testament chronology led to the partial rejection of a static conception of the universe. Understanding of historical time became linear, not cyclical - those like Chastellux and Condorcet saw the decisive changes as technological. Both saw history as the slow unfolding of a universal and unchanging 'reason'.

It was considered that society must be changed to make it worthy of the individual, and not vice versa. The cult of primitivism saw belief in the alienation of the individual from society, Rousseau lamented the lost virtues of 'natural' society, and desired to go back to it. Most political writers of the century agreed society had degenerated from primitive natural liberty to political authority/social convention.

Kant and Rousseau's position on Christianity was it was symbolic as a messenger of divine truth, unrelated to the veracity of the Gospels which he did not accept. Natural religion conveyed to man what he needed to know about moral duty. The whole purpose of religion was moral action, and that man was a free moral agent, which implied the rejection of original sin.

The genius, a non-conformist who lay out his own path, was written about by Goethe as one that manifested his powers through the overstepping of laws and being above restraint. Goethe and Schiller glorified the anarchic liberty of the individual who made his own law.

Helvetius was against the idea of the greatest number being the only criterion of social action, inspired by the objective world of Locke that occurred to all. Instead, to Helvetius majority opinions were based on the wrong methodology, marking out the 'genius' as one distinguished from the multitude by the intensity of his passion. This genius decided his own course of life, as a nonconformist.