The Enlightenment's How of Happiness
- sofiapbaker
- Jun 16, 2021
- 1 min read
It’s always difficult for persons of a conservative temperament to know what to think about the Enlightenment. If we consider the Enlightenment simply as a period of time, of course, the very idea of judging it makes little sense; periods of time are not a proper object of moral evaluation. If we think of it as a movement, however, with leaders, supporters, and opponents, practical goals and guiding principles, moral evaluation becomes unavoidable. The Enlightenment movement still shapes the times we live in, and it still arouses fervent support and bitter hostility. Moreover, since the 18th century the world has changed drastically, for better and for worse, and Enlightenment teachings that conservatives like Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre once contested nowadays can appear as bulwarks of sanity against barbarism. On the other hand, the Enlightenment tradition—a phrase that would have seemed oxymoronic to the philosophes themselves—encoded some traits in its DNA that, when combined with certain noxious genes of later times, Marxism for example, produced the monstrosities that today threaten the civilizational achievements of the West, including those of the Enlightenment itself…