Good essay, as per usual. I think empiricism was really cemented by Locke, rather than Descartes, in his series of debates over the matter with Leibniz. Descartes/Leibniz were pioneers of the scientific method but still accepted the power of reason and the existence of innate ideas. Yes, Locke was not an atheist, but his empiricist and nominalist beliefs would become fuel for Atheists centuries later. Hume was also a thinker who contributed to the "Atheist" reputation of the enlightenment. Obviously kind of dumb when Leibniz and Pascal's arguments are equally relevant in favor of theism today.
I wouldn't really consider Rousseau the precursor to Marx either. He was more of an anarchist.
I think Rousseau is an influence to Marx insofar as Anarchism is influential to Marxism, not that Marx was a strict adherent of Rousseau's philosophy.
I also understand why people say that The Enlightenment was Atheist in general sense but particularly the argument falls flat since every one of the Enlightenment Thinkers said that civil society was in some way predicated on religious beliefs, even if those beliefs weren't Christian.
It was pretty big. A lot of major Enlightenment works were just letters between Thinkers or their patrons after all. It wasn’t the only thing though as salons were important for debates.
Meh. Overall I like him but some of his particular beliefs are strange to me and I think they are wrong. I think also that he sort of reinvents the wheel a lot of the time.
"In general I think it is really a reflection of TradCaths/OrthoBros hating to see a Protestant Wigga going hard in the paint, but whatever."
The reality of this quote as a former TradCath caused my sides to not just go into orbit but break through the Firmament itself and start circling around Gabriel's head.
People like you make me, a WASP Southern Nationalist, not feel so alone in this corner of the internet anymore. Looking forward to reading more of your work.
Nietzsche and Spengler argued that once society is not driven by pure unnamed will to power and starts thinking on what's it's doing, then it starts to decline. Enlightement was that for the west
To me, the state of nature for the European man has traditionally been blood and hierarchy. The contract was written in the household, through blood. This sort of attitude existed for thousands of years, and it was based, and it created kingdoms and empires ad nasuem until relatively recently, in the sense that once we dropped this system things slowly unraveled until today.
I am assuming that they think the state of nature is individuals acting in relative chaos, and the social contract is a way to bind them together.
A contract wouldn't be written in the household as they are already in a union. Contracts are for people who don't already have an agreement. Generally, they are specifically for people who you do not trust to honor their deal, which is reflected in both Hobbes' definition and contemporary contract law.
I am torn on this period because I hate Rousseau and how much he has been shoved down my throat in education. However, I am incredibly grateful for the religious debates that occurred in this period. I mark it as a positive event for the European folk spirit that we started questioning our Christian dogmas.
Rousseau specifically mentions he may be descended from "emperir Noah, and King Adam" and I thought he came up with that himself. Oh, the keks I had reading that one. I think many of these thinkers would be more interesting if their arguments utilized western mythologies over the Abrahamic ones.
How could anyone (speaking within the biblical framework) NOT be descended from Adam and Noah? One was the first human ever, and the other was a genetic bottleneck. What’s that even supposed to mean? Who else would you be descended from?
The biblical framework is wrong because we don't descend from two primordial humans and we didn't bottle eclipse as a species with Noah. What do you mean?
It doesn’t matter if you believe in the biblical narrative or not, the point is that if Rousseau did, it doesn’t make any sense for him to single himself out as being (maybe) descended from Adam and Noah, since according to the bible, ALL humans are descended from those two by definition. And if he didn’t believe in the Bible, he likely wouldn’t have believed in Adam and Noah as being real historical figures either, just like you probably don’t.
So I’m just wondering what you think he meant by that.
This isn't necessarily true. A close reading of Genesis reveals that there were other humans who existed outside the garden who were not descendedants of Adam or Eve. It's also not necessarily true that Noah was a bottle neck of humanity as the Flood was necessarily a global flood (and it is unlikely that it was given the evidence). The Bible doesn't really even claim it was global if you read it within the proper mythohistorical context.
Oh, the unique part is this idea that Noah and Adam were somehow the source of nobility. This bothers me because this clearly stems from the much older European religious habit (later instinct) that we descend from the Divine and that this is the source of our nobility and authority. It also bothers me because there's much better arguments to be found using our own traditions to assert our nobility and authority. I hadn't heard this Christian idea except from Rousseau (the biblical view of this) but I guess it was more common than I thought in that time period.
You miss the fundamental flaw of the Enlightenment thinking - solipsistic obsession with man as a singular intellect, which interfaces with the world on basis of rational faculties alone. Another one is the existence of "state of nature" and "social contract" as separate and accept the anachronism of one being a stage of another. Humans are communal creatures, so society is our default "state of nature", and all discourse on leadership and organisation default to hierarchies and how we go about organising them. Liberalism, which takes inspiration from Enlightenment thinking, tries to dissolve this natural desire for hierarchies by supercharging individualistic drives but at the same time demanding no difference in outcomes for both.
Once again, critics of The Enlightenment prove that they don't actually read any Enlightenment work by failing to grasp the numerous contrasting viewpoints and instead assume everyone had the same ideas on these things.
I've read them, believe it or not. From Cartesian "I think therefore I am" through to Liberal desire to liberate man from bounds of reality itself, we are talking about a strand of thought that ultimately wants to bend reality to an assumed ideal, which fails to materialise. The nuances presented read like a first year of political theory (been there, done that), regurgitating well-trodden points, but wanting to drop the weight of the error on later 19th century thinkers, as opposed to looking at the root cause. Even Hobbes' Leviathan deviates from traditional communal approach to human life, but discusses everything in the humanist perspective of an individual, who, albeit irrational in the imagined "state of nature", has to be compelled to reason and civilisation through external force.
Everything about the last 200 years of human history has proven that the utopian ideals will kill humanity, because we can never measure up to the theory - "if we push harder, if we cross one more boundary, we will find our liberation there".
You clearly haven't read them then. Most of the Enlightenment Thinkers were not utopians, probably because Moore's Utopia was just as fresh on their mind as Descartes. Hobbes especially was a pessimist to the extreme so its ridiculous that you try to associate him with actual utopians like the socialists of the 19th century. Nor only that but you once again slap the name "Liberal" on all Enlightenment Thinkers as if it somehow fits. Two of the people I mentioned in the article were staunch Monarchists lmao. Not only that but you seem to completely miss Rousseau's Romanticism and pretend like he was a pure rationalist, again betraying the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about.
I would be genuinely shocked if you had even heard the name Robert Filmer before reading this article. You clearly have a very cursory view of The Enlightenment and what you do know of it is tainted by your pwn preconceived notions. I explicitly showed how some of the most influential Enlightenment Thinkers weren't even Classical Liberals and yet here you are.
You also have an utterly infantile understanding of the State of Nature and the Social Contract. Hobbes explicitly states that man clamors to form a Social Contract because the State of Nature is repugnant and not conducive to good living. And yet you still pretend like he's some sort of hyper individualist, when THE LITERAL FRONTISPIECE OF HIS BOOK IS A COLLECTIVIST ICON. You also fail to grasp the fact that Rousseau's own concept of the State is explicitly communitarian in a sort of Edenic utopia, where people live in harmony. The formation of a Social Contract does not beget collective living in his worldview, it taints it.
You say that I have a very basic understanding and yet here you are with the most inane chud drivel that is clearly informed by nothing more than skimming a few Wikipedia articles.
Again, all of the understanding you present is surface level. Conceptually the ideas on both Rousseau and Hobbes, if we want to stick to those two for the moment, embody the same running theme of hinging everything on either idealistic view of human nature, or idealistic perspectives on what humaniry can be - we get utopian (as in unrealistic, not referring to Moore) conception that humanity can be improved or ameliorated by adherence to "social contract" device, none of which is actually borne out either in human history or anthropology. Both states of nature are artificial devices, but where Hobbes still relies on Christian "fallen man" to start his argument, Rousseau adopts the "noble savage".
Filmore I have not read, nor do I refer to him, but if his opposition to Hobbes and Locke is noted, then I really don't need to.
Seriously, your meta level analysis is nonexistent. I admire the attitude, unnecessarily aggressive may it be.
It is completely inane to think that humans are not improved at all by the Social Contract. Your crass description of the Social Contract as something which will fix all of humanities ills is not even supported by the literature here. For Hobbes, the necessity of the Social Contract is that human nature isn't changed at all by signing it. The Social Contract does not improve humanity in some arbitrary and magical way like you somehow read it to. It is not magic dirt. The Social Contract means that humans give up certain rights to things in exchange for safety, allowing for them to be punished should they step out of line.
Not one word of Hobbes' work is even remotely utopian in nature. He views humans as entirely consistent in their behavior, to a point where he isn't convinced they will work for the greater good unless they are port of a civil society.
Once again, Rousseau does not believe humanity can be improved by the Social Contract and in fact believes the opposite. I showed this several times in the article, using excerpts from his work.
Turning back to your description of the State of Nature, either Hobbes or Rousseau and all their followers MUST have a correct description of the State of Nature as it is fundamentally tautological. Hobbes believes humans are ultimately flawed and sinful, Rousseau believes humans are ultimately good.
Once again you fail to identify the dividing line between different Enlightenment ideologies and mistakenly paint it as monolithic and homogenous. You don't even identify problems with their methodology aside from strawmanning their position into something it's not (re: Hobbes does not believe Humans can be improved on a basic level with the Social Contract).
When you don't strawman their positions such that the Social Contract is the key to utopia's doors, their claims become a lot more reasonable. Shocking, I know. Hobbes only says that the Social Contract provides a means to keep people in line by force, Locke says it is a means to protect individual's property rights (from which all other rights extend), and Rousseau contends that the Social Contract is at best a simulacrum of the true freedom of the edenic State of Nature. Methodologically each of these positions are sound and each one is at least partially reflected in every day observations.
Again, and again, you run in circles drawn for you by each theorist, not recognising, or unwilling to recognise, the framework used to draw the premise and conclusion in both. Both are inherently flawed, since "state of nature" as a positon never existed for humans, as I stated before, nor does the social contract, save as a descriptive device for a frame of society.
I am not drawing a distinction between either, again, as both work from the same premise of humanistic individual being the building block for the process of political structure, and with inbuilt assumptions about human morality which are gross and inaccurate simplifcations.
Lockean liberalism is another facet of the same premise. Again, internal coherence is not disputable, but the application to what the actual reality is.
I think that there is something to be said about deism, naturalistic philosophy and the popularity of thinkers like Hegel and Spinoza, and the general development of Darwinian thinking in tandem with this. I think that slowly overtime the western world completely shed its mythopoetic consciousness with these thinkers in particular. Wherein God slowly became more and more abstract, as a principle, or overwhelmingly identified with nature. Varieties of pantheistic and deistic thinking, as well as Hegels notion that outside of the world of representation, there was “no-thing”, the immanent focus of enlightenment era philosophies are certainly integral in exiling tradition. I had left a similar comment on Bloodtheisms post about naturalist monism(which I see as a glorified form of materialism), that essentially, the spirituality of classical theism and its literality was broken by enlightenment and renaissance thinking. It’s no coincidence that many secret societies and fraternal orders around this time also developed these ideas in Europe, most notably, Freemasons and the Royal Society, and Rosicrucian orders. This was followed up with Theosophy, and so on. I think it’s obvious that around this time, the intellectual climate began to become increasingly visceral, placing much more focus in empirical and immanent concerns. In that way I do think that a traditionalist account of the enlightenment is still mostly valid considering that it’s a pandora’s box that cannot be unopened. The current world order and its spirit is entirely entrenched in “Dianoia”, or a kind of evaluative and sterile methodology. Whereas historical and traditional societies worldviews almost exclusively operated on Noesis. I see Fascism in some capacity as a response to this, with its promises of a return to a peaceful pastoral existence, at the cost of wanton cleansing violence, one that was governed by various kinds of theism, whether classical monotheism or polytheism. While its true that nominalism, “atheism”, variations of materialism or pantheisms have existed since time immemorial, we do see them become very popular in tandem with the advances of science and enlightenment thinking, and they were instrumental in delivering us to where we are currently.
Good essay, as per usual. I think empiricism was really cemented by Locke, rather than Descartes, in his series of debates over the matter with Leibniz. Descartes/Leibniz were pioneers of the scientific method but still accepted the power of reason and the existence of innate ideas. Yes, Locke was not an atheist, but his empiricist and nominalist beliefs would become fuel for Atheists centuries later. Hume was also a thinker who contributed to the "Atheist" reputation of the enlightenment. Obviously kind of dumb when Leibniz and Pascal's arguments are equally relevant in favor of theism today.
I wouldn't really consider Rousseau the precursor to Marx either. He was more of an anarchist.
I think Rousseau is an influence to Marx insofar as Anarchism is influential to Marxism, not that Marx was a strict adherent of Rousseau's philosophy.
I also understand why people say that The Enlightenment was Atheist in general sense but particularly the argument falls flat since every one of the Enlightenment Thinkers said that civil society was in some way predicated on religious beliefs, even if those beliefs weren't Christian.
Yes, and the arguments made by Leibniz and Pascal remain some of the most commonly used arguments in favor of theism.
I've waited patiently for this for so long!
Alright @zeusouranios7 Knox did his defense of the Enlightenment, now you are obligated to do your defense of Prohibition ASAP.
https://swaggerswithattitude.com/posts/242?q=voltaire+
I thought about including Voltaire in the post but decided not to since he is obnoxious.
What role do you think the culture of letters played in the Enlightenment?
It was pretty big. A lot of major Enlightenment works were just letters between Thinkers or their patrons after all. It wasn’t the only thing though as salons were important for debates.
I think my beliefs might be a combination of Hobbes and Locke.
You don't like violence?
Hmm, that's not what I intended...
The problem is that I haven't read Filmer and Rousseau is obviously a communist, so...
https://singh47.substack.com/p/why-every-american-is-a-nigger
https://singh47.substack.com/p/individualism-v-sikhi
A Polycentric POV states the Gods are realized through cults (actions).
For what is the difference between individual worship (contemplation) and the cult?
Collective social action.
Politics is the art of engaging the collective.
Religion is inherently political/collective.
Religio meaning divine obligation or duty.
Politics is the art of manifesting your religion in the material plane
https://singh47.substack.com/p/cultic-polytheism-maryada-god-politics
This is why I oppose the peace of westphalia
ਅਕਾਲ
mine are a wombo combo of hobbes and filmer
Wdy think about Kant
Meh. Overall I like him but some of his particular beliefs are strange to me and I think they are wrong. I think also that he sort of reinvents the wheel a lot of the time.
I keep coming back to this, definitetly the best piece on the enlightenment, and what is your take on Goethe?
I'm not overly familiar with the German Enlightenment thinkers, I've focused more on the English thinkers really.
"In general I think it is really a reflection of TradCaths/OrthoBros hating to see a Protestant Wigga going hard in the paint, but whatever."
The reality of this quote as a former TradCath caused my sides to not just go into orbit but break through the Firmament itself and start circling around Gabriel's head.
People like you make me, a WASP Southern Nationalist, not feel so alone in this corner of the internet anymore. Looking forward to reading more of your work.
Nietzsche and Spengler argued that once society is not driven by pure unnamed will to power and starts thinking on what's it's doing, then it starts to decline. Enlightement was that for the west
I think Nietzsche and Spengler were pretty retarded on a lot of things, so.
Ok.
Those guys suck but that is a pretty good point
Thomas Hobbes had a point but he was ultimately wrong.
Locke and Rousseau were just plain wrong about everything from a foundational level.
Filmer was correct in everything he ever wrote.
To me, the state of nature for the European man has traditionally been blood and hierarchy. The contract was written in the household, through blood. This sort of attitude existed for thousands of years, and it was based, and it created kingdoms and empires ad nasuem until relatively recently, in the sense that once we dropped this system things slowly unraveled until today.
I am assuming that they think the state of nature is individuals acting in relative chaos, and the social contract is a way to bind them together.
A contract wouldn't be written in the household as they are already in a union. Contracts are for people who don't already have an agreement. Generally, they are specifically for people who you do not trust to honor their deal, which is reflected in both Hobbes' definition and contemporary contract law.
I am torn on this period because I hate Rousseau and how much he has been shoved down my throat in education. However, I am incredibly grateful for the religious debates that occurred in this period. I mark it as a positive event for the European folk spirit that we started questioning our Christian dogmas.
Rousseau specifically mentions he may be descended from "emperir Noah, and King Adam" and I thought he came up with that himself. Oh, the keks I had reading that one. I think many of these thinkers would be more interesting if their arguments utilized western mythologies over the Abrahamic ones.
Good article, interesting stuff here
How could anyone (speaking within the biblical framework) NOT be descended from Adam and Noah? One was the first human ever, and the other was a genetic bottleneck. What’s that even supposed to mean? Who else would you be descended from?
The biblical framework is wrong because we don't descend from two primordial humans and we didn't bottle eclipse as a species with Noah. What do you mean?
It doesn’t matter if you believe in the biblical narrative or not, the point is that if Rousseau did, it doesn’t make any sense for him to single himself out as being (maybe) descended from Adam and Noah, since according to the bible, ALL humans are descended from those two by definition. And if he didn’t believe in the Bible, he likely wouldn’t have believed in Adam and Noah as being real historical figures either, just like you probably don’t.
So I’m just wondering what you think he meant by that.
This isn't necessarily true. A close reading of Genesis reveals that there were other humans who existed outside the garden who were not descendedants of Adam or Eve. It's also not necessarily true that Noah was a bottle neck of humanity as the Flood was necessarily a global flood (and it is unlikely that it was given the evidence). The Bible doesn't really even claim it was global if you read it within the proper mythohistorical context.
Oh, the unique part is this idea that Noah and Adam were somehow the source of nobility. This bothers me because this clearly stems from the much older European religious habit (later instinct) that we descend from the Divine and that this is the source of our nobility and authority. It also bothers me because there's much better arguments to be found using our own traditions to assert our nobility and authority. I hadn't heard this Christian idea except from Rousseau (the biblical view of this) but I guess it was more common than I thought in that time period.
Rousseau didn't think that nigga, that was Filmer as mentioned in the post.
It's in his book, social contract. He cautiously says it, and puts them above reproach.
You miss the fundamental flaw of the Enlightenment thinking - solipsistic obsession with man as a singular intellect, which interfaces with the world on basis of rational faculties alone. Another one is the existence of "state of nature" and "social contract" as separate and accept the anachronism of one being a stage of another. Humans are communal creatures, so society is our default "state of nature", and all discourse on leadership and organisation default to hierarchies and how we go about organising them. Liberalism, which takes inspiration from Enlightenment thinking, tries to dissolve this natural desire for hierarchies by supercharging individualistic drives but at the same time demanding no difference in outcomes for both.
Once again, critics of The Enlightenment prove that they don't actually read any Enlightenment work by failing to grasp the numerous contrasting viewpoints and instead assume everyone had the same ideas on these things.
I've read them, believe it or not. From Cartesian "I think therefore I am" through to Liberal desire to liberate man from bounds of reality itself, we are talking about a strand of thought that ultimately wants to bend reality to an assumed ideal, which fails to materialise. The nuances presented read like a first year of political theory (been there, done that), regurgitating well-trodden points, but wanting to drop the weight of the error on later 19th century thinkers, as opposed to looking at the root cause. Even Hobbes' Leviathan deviates from traditional communal approach to human life, but discusses everything in the humanist perspective of an individual, who, albeit irrational in the imagined "state of nature", has to be compelled to reason and civilisation through external force.
Everything about the last 200 years of human history has proven that the utopian ideals will kill humanity, because we can never measure up to the theory - "if we push harder, if we cross one more boundary, we will find our liberation there".
You clearly haven't read them then. Most of the Enlightenment Thinkers were not utopians, probably because Moore's Utopia was just as fresh on their mind as Descartes. Hobbes especially was a pessimist to the extreme so its ridiculous that you try to associate him with actual utopians like the socialists of the 19th century. Nor only that but you once again slap the name "Liberal" on all Enlightenment Thinkers as if it somehow fits. Two of the people I mentioned in the article were staunch Monarchists lmao. Not only that but you seem to completely miss Rousseau's Romanticism and pretend like he was a pure rationalist, again betraying the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about.
I would be genuinely shocked if you had even heard the name Robert Filmer before reading this article. You clearly have a very cursory view of The Enlightenment and what you do know of it is tainted by your pwn preconceived notions. I explicitly showed how some of the most influential Enlightenment Thinkers weren't even Classical Liberals and yet here you are.
You also have an utterly infantile understanding of the State of Nature and the Social Contract. Hobbes explicitly states that man clamors to form a Social Contract because the State of Nature is repugnant and not conducive to good living. And yet you still pretend like he's some sort of hyper individualist, when THE LITERAL FRONTISPIECE OF HIS BOOK IS A COLLECTIVIST ICON. You also fail to grasp the fact that Rousseau's own concept of the State is explicitly communitarian in a sort of Edenic utopia, where people live in harmony. The formation of a Social Contract does not beget collective living in his worldview, it taints it.
You say that I have a very basic understanding and yet here you are with the most inane chud drivel that is clearly informed by nothing more than skimming a few Wikipedia articles.
Again, all of the understanding you present is surface level. Conceptually the ideas on both Rousseau and Hobbes, if we want to stick to those two for the moment, embody the same running theme of hinging everything on either idealistic view of human nature, or idealistic perspectives on what humaniry can be - we get utopian (as in unrealistic, not referring to Moore) conception that humanity can be improved or ameliorated by adherence to "social contract" device, none of which is actually borne out either in human history or anthropology. Both states of nature are artificial devices, but where Hobbes still relies on Christian "fallen man" to start his argument, Rousseau adopts the "noble savage".
Filmore I have not read, nor do I refer to him, but if his opposition to Hobbes and Locke is noted, then I really don't need to.
Seriously, your meta level analysis is nonexistent. I admire the attitude, unnecessarily aggressive may it be.
It is completely inane to think that humans are not improved at all by the Social Contract. Your crass description of the Social Contract as something which will fix all of humanities ills is not even supported by the literature here. For Hobbes, the necessity of the Social Contract is that human nature isn't changed at all by signing it. The Social Contract does not improve humanity in some arbitrary and magical way like you somehow read it to. It is not magic dirt. The Social Contract means that humans give up certain rights to things in exchange for safety, allowing for them to be punished should they step out of line.
Not one word of Hobbes' work is even remotely utopian in nature. He views humans as entirely consistent in their behavior, to a point where he isn't convinced they will work for the greater good unless they are port of a civil society.
Once again, Rousseau does not believe humanity can be improved by the Social Contract and in fact believes the opposite. I showed this several times in the article, using excerpts from his work.
Turning back to your description of the State of Nature, either Hobbes or Rousseau and all their followers MUST have a correct description of the State of Nature as it is fundamentally tautological. Hobbes believes humans are ultimately flawed and sinful, Rousseau believes humans are ultimately good.
Once again you fail to identify the dividing line between different Enlightenment ideologies and mistakenly paint it as monolithic and homogenous. You don't even identify problems with their methodology aside from strawmanning their position into something it's not (re: Hobbes does not believe Humans can be improved on a basic level with the Social Contract).
When you don't strawman their positions such that the Social Contract is the key to utopia's doors, their claims become a lot more reasonable. Shocking, I know. Hobbes only says that the Social Contract provides a means to keep people in line by force, Locke says it is a means to protect individual's property rights (from which all other rights extend), and Rousseau contends that the Social Contract is at best a simulacrum of the true freedom of the edenic State of Nature. Methodologically each of these positions are sound and each one is at least partially reflected in every day observations.
Again, and again, you run in circles drawn for you by each theorist, not recognising, or unwilling to recognise, the framework used to draw the premise and conclusion in both. Both are inherently flawed, since "state of nature" as a positon never existed for humans, as I stated before, nor does the social contract, save as a descriptive device for a frame of society.
I am not drawing a distinction between either, again, as both work from the same premise of humanistic individual being the building block for the process of political structure, and with inbuilt assumptions about human morality which are gross and inaccurate simplifcations.
Lockean liberalism is another facet of the same premise. Again, internal coherence is not disputable, but the application to what the actual reality is.
The nuclear family doesn't exist in the state of nature.
The clan does, and society reverts to it post liberal state collapse.
The enlightenment sees violence, war etc as bad.
It's a divorce of the clergy from the nobility, and the precursor to the modern safety culture.
However, that's Christianity at its essence. The enlightenment is a de-Germanization of European christianity.
I think that there is something to be said about deism, naturalistic philosophy and the popularity of thinkers like Hegel and Spinoza, and the general development of Darwinian thinking in tandem with this. I think that slowly overtime the western world completely shed its mythopoetic consciousness with these thinkers in particular. Wherein God slowly became more and more abstract, as a principle, or overwhelmingly identified with nature. Varieties of pantheistic and deistic thinking, as well as Hegels notion that outside of the world of representation, there was “no-thing”, the immanent focus of enlightenment era philosophies are certainly integral in exiling tradition. I had left a similar comment on Bloodtheisms post about naturalist monism(which I see as a glorified form of materialism), that essentially, the spirituality of classical theism and its literality was broken by enlightenment and renaissance thinking. It’s no coincidence that many secret societies and fraternal orders around this time also developed these ideas in Europe, most notably, Freemasons and the Royal Society, and Rosicrucian orders. This was followed up with Theosophy, and so on. I think it’s obvious that around this time, the intellectual climate began to become increasingly visceral, placing much more focus in empirical and immanent concerns. In that way I do think that a traditionalist account of the enlightenment is still mostly valid considering that it’s a pandora’s box that cannot be unopened. The current world order and its spirit is entirely entrenched in “Dianoia”, or a kind of evaluative and sterile methodology. Whereas historical and traditional societies worldviews almost exclusively operated on Noesis. I see Fascism in some capacity as a response to this, with its promises of a return to a peaceful pastoral existence, at the cost of wanton cleansing violence, one that was governed by various kinds of theism, whether classical monotheism or polytheism. While its true that nominalism, “atheism”, variations of materialism or pantheisms have existed since time immemorial, we do see them become very popular in tandem with the advances of science and enlightenment thinking, and they were instrumental in delivering us to where we are currently.