Yesterday a good friend and colleague of mine remarked,
I don’t understand people who valorize the Enlightenment, as if Cartesian rationality is the be all, end all of philosophy.
He then went on to wonder whether Jonathan Israel’s books are worth reading. The answer to the second question is an emphatic “yes!” I would especially recommend his book Radical Enlightenment. As for the first remark, Enlightenment, for me, does not mean Cartesian rationality, nor even necessarily a particular period in history, but something like a virtual tendency within human social collectives that exists, to use Badiou’s language in Logics of Worlds, with greater or lesser intensity or brightness at all times and places.
What, then, is the nature of this tendency and intensity? For me– and others will differ –Enlightenment is a synonym for immanence. This immanence unfolds along three axis and can develop unevenly, referring to the ontological, the epistemological, and the political. For this to be understood, immanence must be contrasted with transcendence. Transcendence, as an ontological orientation, refers to any orientation premised on vertical being where some being or entity stands above everything else, affecting all other things without itself being affected. The most obvious instance of transcendence would be something like Plato’s forms or certain conceptions of God, where the forms and God stand above all being, giving it form and structure, legislating being, without themselves being affected in return. In the domain of politics, transcendence is the transcendence of authority, of the sovereign, the transcendence of the father, the transcendence of the leader, where legislation issues absolutely from this being, where this being is above the law himself, and where absolute obedience is commanded. Political transcendence is de-libidinalized Oedipalism. Here we should think of Schmitt. Finally, epistemological transcendence is any thesis of knowledge based on revelation, special mystical insight, or the authority of sacred figures as in the case of how the Scholastics talked about Aristotle and the Bible.
read on!
By contrast, immanence, I believe, is the thesis that the world is enough. At the ontological level, Enlightenment or immanence means that there is no “extra-being”, no “supplementary being” in the form of a transcendent God, forms, or essences, but rather that there is only a single flat plane of being where entities act and react to one another. Here we should think of Lucretius’s interacting atoms, Spinoza’s monism, or Darwin’s ecology. Within these frameworks there is no ontological legislator that stands above being. At the political level, Enlightenment means communism in the strict sense of the “common”. Politically, Enlightenment is the view that it is the people (and nonhumans!) that make society, that there are no transcendent legislators entitled to rule by virtue of some innate superiority, and that even where there are sovereigns, the authority of these sovereigns only issues from the people and nonhumans and not any intrinsic feature of their being such as blood, divine will, money, superior intelligence, or superior military prowess. Finally, in the domain of knowledge, Enlightenment or immanence means that everyone deserves an argument or a demonstration, that everyone can participate in argument and demonstrate, and that we don’t take someone’s word for it just because they’re a king, church father, respected scholar, etc. Here Enlightenment means that even a young and unknown upstart like Einstein can challenge a giant like Newton.
I don’t see Enlightenment as Cartesian (or Humean!) rationality, though I do believe these forms of rationality have been indispensable in challenging priests and despots, and in helping to promote communism where people both come to know the world together and where they form society together rather than simply taking orders. Enlightenment has meant that popes don’t get to decide who rules based on blood lines, family alliances, and treaties in ways that don’t work to the interests of the people, but rather that the people get to decide these issues. When a Spinoza, Hume, Descartes, or Freud explore the “passions” or affects, untangling what comes from us rather than from the world, they are practicing the ideal of enlightenment by rationally approaching affects and finding ways to free us from the sad passions that haunt us and render us miserable and that generate so much human cruelty. I also see the project of pursuing equality, the participation of all regardless of gender, race, and religion, and the struggle for economic equality as lying at the heart of enlightenment. All of these struggles are premised, once again, on immanence and the thesis that our qualities are not intrinsic, but that we make ourselves who we are. With Kant I agree that Enlightenment consists in humankind freeing itself from its self-imposed immaturity. That immaturity consists of our need for fathers to govern us and in mythological thinking about the world. Against Kant, I reject the thesis that enlightenment should not challenge despots or authorities. Enlightenment has taken a number of knocks, being blamed for environmental devastation, war, human cruelty, colonial cruelty, capitalist inequality, etc. To my thinking, these things aren’t the result of enlightenment but of not being enlightened enough. Indeed, the very fact that we critique enlightenment in this way is central to enlightenment.
Larval Subjects . 
October 29, 2011 at 6:00 am
I like the idea of ‘Enlightenment as immanence’, but according to what would you justify such a claim? I’m surprised by your dismissal of Enlightenment-based suppression, as if Adorno and Horkheimer were just flat wrong in their critique.
October 29, 2011 at 1:29 pm
I’ve never understood how enlightenment and reason could be responsible for the Holocaust and national socialism. These things strike me as the opposite of enlightenment. They were rabidly authoritarian movements whereas enlightenment was the categorical rejection of authority.
October 29, 2011 at 3:43 pm
Great post. I just want to comment on what you say about Enlightenment and history, because this is interesting. I was just reading André Tosel’s article “Superstition and Reading” on Spinoza, and according to Tosel Spinoza does not understand history as the past but as the coexistence of a struggle between two possibilities of life and knowledge (then it’s about intensity, immanence). Tosel says: “In other words, the forces and causes that produce unintelligibility are still active” (p. 166 in The New Spinoza). I’m not making any argument here, but I just feel this resonates well with what you’re saying.
I’ve also thought about Meillassoux’s statement recently: “The authentic tradition of immanence resides in the Platonic divine, and in the gods of Spinoza and Hegel, not in the ‘philosophical atheism’ of Heidegger.” Still thinking about Spinoza here, and what you say about Enlightenment, history, and immanence, this resonates well. In Spinoza we find the idea that the foundation of superstition lies in fear of God, so there’s a connection between superstition and transcendence. Spinoza’s affirmative thinking through God, his “authentic” immanence, is just the opposite of this. It’s Enlightenment.
October 29, 2011 at 6:02 pm
Nice post.
What do you think of Habermas’s appropriation of enlightenment and modernitiy?
October 29, 2011 at 7:42 pm
Interesting use of ‘extra-being’.
Isn’t this Meinong’s term, and used by Deleuze in LoS, I think, as synonymous with Sense?The ‘fourth dimension’ of the proposition.
One might playfully say that the proposition (and ‘the world’) is not enough, and presupposes an element or ‘stratum’ that is capable of generating denotation etc.
The incorporeal sense. Not ‘transcendental’ to the proposition but irreducible to it.
Btw, has any reader of this comment read David Abram’s books – ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ and ‘Becoming Animal’. I haven’t but wonder what they’re like.
October 30, 2011 at 1:01 am
Kris,
When you ask for justification I’m not sure if you’re asking for justification of immanence itself or justification of the thesis that the works of enlightenment were obsessed with immanence. I think the latter claim is pretty easy to justify. First, between Scholastic thought and Enlightenment thought you see a mutation in the style of argument. That form of argument that consists in appeals to authority (Aristotle, the Bible, the church fathers, etc) largely disappears, and instead you get something like “direct demonstration” through reason or observation, where the legitimacy of the argument isn’t based on the authority of the speaker, but rather on the correctness of the reason and observation. Across the board you see a turn to immanence whether in the form of what is immanent to mind (Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) or in what is immanent to existence rather than reference to transcendent deity (Spinoza, Diderot, Laplanche, etc). In the political realm, the concept of sovereignty undergoes a fundamental transformation. Sovereignty no longer issues from God, but from the people as in the case of Hobbes, Rousseau, and later Marx. Even God is talked about differently. With the Protestant Reformation the thesis of a direct relationship with God arises and the lay now gets the freedom to interpret sacred texts for themselves. Among the religious rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz), demonstrations of God no longer proceed through the revelation of scripture, but through what can be deduced by reason (what’s immanent to mind), and they reserve the right for reason to determine the features of God even if they contradict revelation. Later, Kant will argue for radical immanence to mind with his Copernican revolution and use this as a way to undermine the rationalist arguments for the existence of God. These, I think, are all shifts towards immanence. I am, inclined, to say that Enlightenment is a tendency that exists everywhere and anywhere because the inaugural gesture of philosophy consists in a break from priests and mythology.
October 30, 2011 at 2:31 am
As I said in the Twitterverse, I have no quarrel with the idea that the Enlightenment emphasized a turn toward immanence, and I think you’re speaking past the point of my original claim. In the beginning, I was critiquing theorists who posit the Enlightenment, and especially Cartesian rationality, as the culmination of a grand teleological process, thereby leaving the ‘Other’, much less philosophies espoused by the ‘Other’, out in the cold. You’re not doing that; you would never do that. For you, subaltern philosophies are immanent to Enlightenment philosophies, existing, if anything, on an agonistic spectrum. Thus, you rightly argue that suppression–ideational, cultural, political, or physical–in the name of Enlightenment is a bastardization of its motivations. I’d argue for a de-articalizing of the Enlightenment, an enlightenment unprefaced by the word “the”–a subtle act that you’ve committed in this post. Actually, I’d go a step further, arguing that enlightenment’s turn toward immanence necessitates an agonistic pluralism and dissensuality that affirms the agency of all forms of being. In other words, I’d call for an ‘enlivenment’ that goes beyond the instrumental rationality and anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment.
October 30, 2011 at 5:26 am
This is a vivid argument that has the same scope as Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” In other words, we’re not talking history so much as a tendency within thinking that can sprout anywhere. Yet the content is different, very different since Kant’s is about transcendence and this is about immanence. While on the other hand, there is another deep similarity: the revolutionary quality.
October 30, 2011 at 11:03 am
“Turn up the Lights” exclaims Michel Onfray in his book on the enlightenment: “Les Ultras des Lumières”. He shows that the enlightenment contained many figures that were not very radical despite their rhetoric; He points out that many enlightenment figures were not atheists but deists who find religion useful for maintaining the people in their place. He distinguishes the pale Enlightenment figures who defend deism and accomodate to the official power and the more radical figures (the “ultras”) who defend a thoroughgoing immanence (that Onfray further specifies in terms of atheism, materialism, hedonism, revolution) :
“This is why all these deists, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot … and d’Alembert are indefatigable in their critiques of materialist thought: La Mettrie comes under fire from all that clique, which further does not hesitate to attack Meslier and Helvetius, d’Holbach and Sade. For what motive? Their atheism, their materialism, their critique of the Church, their refusal of religions – so many radical condemnations that the pale Enlightenment find distasteful”. (p24, my translation)
So I think that Levi’s idea that Enlightenment is immanence is a useful rule of thumb guide to sorting out those tendencies that really are enlightening (as Enlightenment in this sense is a process), from those that are half-measures and compromises, with the pallid light of their continued submission to transcendence. The problem comes from not enough enlightenment.
October 30, 2011 at 5:57 pm
terrence:
Jonathan Israel likewise distinguish between radical and moderate Enlightenment in his work.
October 31, 2011 at 2:49 am
To that last point: in England at least, professing atheism could get you executed if you were from the “wrong” class. Deism was often a smokescreen for something stronger.
October 31, 2011 at 3:35 pm
1) Tim, yes but Onfray contrasts Voltaire who denies that an atheist can be moral and Bayle who declares that this is perfectly possible. He ties this to the pale Enlightenment that makes its peace with religion as a form of social control, even if it criticises historical Christianity. Further there s the difference between those (the pale, the dull) who think that the free exercise of reason must be limited to the élite and their “salons”, and the others (the bright, the intense) who believe that the free exercise of reason is for everyone and for all of life, not just in special contexts. That being said, you are right that in a time of persecution only a fool would cry from the rooftops his unbelief. But the excuse of prudence and dissimulation cannot cover all deviations we can discover from the myth surrounding certain figures. Galileo was right to renounce, Descartes was probably right not to publish his Treatise on Light, but Voltaire was wrong to justify the death penalty for atheists.
2)Christian, thank you for your comment as I have not yet read Israel. Onfray mentions him but claims that he himself is doing something different. It would be interesting to know Israel’s criteria for sorting out who is radical and who is timid. I found that Onfray’s criteria came quite close to Levi’s: he speaks explicitly in terms of immanence and of the free and democratic use of reason (which corresponds to Levi’s epistemological immanence). He spells that out in his subcriteria of atheism and materialism -which correspond to Levi’s refusal of a hierarchy of being, revolution or communism, and hedonism (as an ethics of immanence). So the two accounts are quite close.
On a more general note, Onfray is a realist, and is quite close to OOO in many respects.
November 3, 2011 at 4:27 pm
[…] I think that Levi Bryant’s idea that Enlightenment is immanence is a useful rule of thumb for sorting out those tendencies that […]
November 4, 2011 at 1:16 pm
I agree with your fundamental attitude. Regarding the Nazis, though, I think what appeared to Adorno and Horkeheimer was the *tragedy* of enlightenment, i.e., that enlightenment had made the Nazis possible. After all, in a spirit of counter-enlightenment – “1789 is abolished” – they wielded the most advanced technology and rational organization that owed its existence to the overturning of the old authorities.
My own attitude, perhaps something like yours, is that this was a result of the continuing *containment* of enlightenment.
November 8, 2011 at 9:22 am
So “mythic” modes of consciousness are “immature” across the board? Are you arguing that the Enlightened are those grown ups who have entirely transcended myth to live in the full light of Reason? Or would you admit that story and narrative are essential and inevitable factors in all human knowledge of self and world?
To my mind, the Enlightenment represents a new awakening to (or remembrance of) a 2,500 year old axial form of mythospeculation that is not only reflexive (as the Greek tragedies and Jewish prophecies were), but now also self-reflexive. Individuals begin to step into their own authority as legitimate grounds for reasons. They need no longer draw explicitly on gods or kings or even kin when they argue for an essential rightness, or goodness, or truth concerning the world. Truth needs no intermediary. Of course, individuals always implicitly draw on ancient traditions of interpretation when they reason, whether they are deriving a mathematical formula in a lab, protesting for their freedom in the streets, or reading the first verses of John’s gospel at their bedside.
The Enlightenment didn’t do away with transcendence or myth. The Enlightenment offered us a new myth, the myth of mythlessness, and a new transcendence, that of Theory and Science. God was killed, but the Mind of Man was crowned in Its place.
I don’t think we need more Enlightenment. We don’t need more myth, either.
We need to integrate theory and story. We are more than merely rational beings. Rational intelligence emerges only within a matrix of culture and symbolism and finds its bearings amidst the stories sustained by this matrix.
Certain passions have haunted and lead us to cruelty, no doubt; but other passions provide the heart’s very reasons for living, “reasons that reason doesn’t know.”
I’m all about the Light.
But let’s not forget that a light casts a shadow.
November 8, 2011 at 9:32 am
[…] Bryant posted recently about how he would define the notion of “Enlightenment.” I agree with part of what he has to say, in that clearly Enlightenment does concern the bursting forth of critique. Where we seem to disagree is on the extent to which critique can ever lift itself entirely outside of the mythopoiesis of the cultures out of which it inevitably arises and to which it ultimately belongs. Here is my response to him: So “mythic” modes of consciousness are “immature” across the board? Are you arguing that the Enlightened are those grown ups who have entirely transcended myth to live in the full light of Reason? Or would you admit that story and narrative are essential and inevitable factors in all human knowledge of self and world? […]
November 8, 2011 at 1:54 pm
The issue, I believe, is not so much myth as transcendence. Transcendence, in all its forms, is what is to be fought.
November 8, 2011 at 2:03 pm
I do think it’s pretty cynical, however, to say we should defend myth because life somehow can’t find meaning without it. That’s a rather patronizing position with respect to believers: “we know these myths aren’t true or accurate descriptions of reality but they need them so we should preserve them.”
November 8, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Transcendence, in all its human forms, is striving for the ideal. Fighting transcendence in all its forms, rather than its dangerous forms, is an annihilation of the ideal. There is a reason my blog is called “immanent transcendence;” we never transcend the immanent, but we do transcend ourselves.
To rephrase my point at Footnotes2Plato, we cannot eliminate mythic thought and the notion that we can do so is paramount hubris. Hence, there is a limit to being “enlightened enough,” and we cannot think that limit. We can speculate about the blindnesses of our hermeneutic circle. In my own case, I propose a pragmatist parallel of Husserl and Heidegger’s critiques, except realist and science-friendly. If you reject that strain of continental thought, then you might reject mine as well.
November 8, 2011 at 3:52 pm
[…] response to a post responding to my post on Enlightenment (apologies for the convoluted phrasing!), Jason Hills, of Immanent Transcendence, writes: The […]
November 8, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Jason,
I don’t think of transcendence in this way. Rather, I see transcendence as some term standing above the world or society that conditions without itself being conditioned. Such terms would be things like Plato’s forms, Gods as conceived by theism, a leader or king that functions as an absolute authority, etc. All of these things lead, I think, to a logic of eradication. Moreover, the idea that because mythic thought cannot be eradicated entails that we should just accept it and embrace it strikes me as a bad argument. It’s likely that cruelty and murder can never be eradicated, but that doesn’t entail we should cease making efforts to overcome them. I don’t see striving to overcome mythology as a form of hubris, but as a struggle for human emancipation and a struggle against cruelty.
November 8, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Levi,
Yes, it is apparent you think that; I’m thinking it another way, and I’m not sure how Leon or Matt are thinking it. I’m trying to think immanent transcendence for reasons important to pragmatism. It also comes up in Heidegger’s essay on self-transcendence (forgot the title) that extends his authenticity vs. Mitsein analysis in Being and Time.
As for mythic thought, we should come to understand it and why it cannot be eradicated but only understood and “managed” (terrible word choice on my part). Why would I suppose the obviously ludicrous position that you think my view entails–just accepting whatever stories we happen to tell ourselves? I don’t. However, denying this limitation is extraordinarily dangerous; people will make their lives meaningful and narrate their lives into stories. This is not something to be emancipated from. It is something to be done well or poorly.
November 8, 2011 at 4:48 pm
Jason,
It’s entirely possible that our positions are not inconsistent, given that we’re using the term “transcendence” in different ways. For example, when you talk about transcendence “as striving for an ideal”, for me so long as those ideals are posited and generated within immanence I have no problem with this. It’s when they become something like Platonic forms or essences (transcendence in my sense) that problems emerge. Second, you’re the one bringing myth into this. I can’t see where I talked about the eradication of myth in my post “What is Enlightenment?”. I talked very specifically about transcendence and was quite clear as to the sense in which I’m using the term “transcendence” (which doesn’t strike me as the same way in which you use this term). In this post, moreover, I don’t see where I talk about the eradication of myths. I talk about the critique of myth and ideology. That doesn’t entail that I believe that all myth is bad or should be eradicated, nor that I think all myth can be eradicated. We’re kinda having a discussion and a debate about claims I never made but which you are attributing to me.
November 8, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Levi,
You said you don’t see where you talked about the eradication of myths in this post.
Just for clarification, it was specifically these sentences that provoked my response:
“Enlightenment consists in humankind freeing itself from its self-imposed immaturity. That immaturity consists of our need for fathers to govern us and in mythological thinking about the world.”
I read you saying, 1) myth is immature, and 2) we should free ourselves from it. Is this not your position?
-Matt
November 8, 2011 at 7:01 pm
Hi Matthew,
“Immaturity” is the word Kant uses in his “What is Enlightenment?” essay I link to in the post. While I don’t think mhthology is intrinsically bad, I do think it’s something we should strive to overcime as far as possible. I do, however, think it’s unlikely we will ever fully do so.
Jason,
Regarding your point that we don’t live in the 16th century any longer (I referenced the 14th), my point was that we find all the same phenomena in pre-Enlightenment social formations and therefore cannot attribute something like the Holocaust to science and technology or the Enlightenment.
November 8, 2011 at 8:10 pm
Levi,
I think our views are basically consistent, yet expressed in very different ways and perhaps with different outlooks. I’m a cynic and pessimist, but I have hope.
November 9, 2011 at 12:03 am
[…] discussion worth attending to erupted earlier this week, precipitated by THIS stimulating post by Levi Bryant (with a follow up by Bryant HERE and a rejoinder from Matt […]
November 11, 2011 at 12:49 pm
[…] and interruption of mythology would have us believe? Levi Bryant has recently published two posts (here and here) that address this question. I found myself in agreement with the first post on […]
July 25, 2012 at 11:50 pm
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