5/24/2023 0 Comments Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker![]() ![]() ![]() Reason is, in the words of Saint Paul, that which allows us to know and conform to the moral law written onto all human hearts. As I’ve briefly written here, looking over the history of philosophy we find two primary usages of ‘reason’ and ‘rationalism.’ The classical tradition, advanced by the likes of the rationalist philosophers of antiquity and Christianity, maintain that reason is that which makes us like God because God is the source of Truth and it is human reason which allows humans to know the objective realities of the good and true and therefore live by that reality. “Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable.” Pinker’s book is filled with pithy phrases like this one which is meant to mystically capture the reader but provide no meaning to such statements. Notwithstanding his florid but unsubstantial rhetoric, Pinker’s book is the product of a juvenile academic who has become the poster boy of Liberalism’s historicist fantasies. In the midst of turbulent transformations and discontents, rather than try to understand the predicament of modernity and its possibility crisis brought forth by the very “Enlightenment” which Pinker subjectively, rosily, and merrily picked from, he doubled down on re-propagating the tired old myth of progress. ![]() Steven Pinker is the public face of contemporary neo-Whiggism. ~ Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology. ![]()
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