[FRA:] Enlightenment under attack

[Catherine Liu]

>None of the responses to Ralph's defence of  the enlightenment are 
>going far enough. The underlying problem with enlightenment values 
>is that they offer no way out of the mass-extinction process that we 
>are currently engaging in. In brief 'humanism', in the sense that it 
>emerges from the enlightenment and the scientific/industrial 
>revolution is now a disaster. When those, like Ralph and Catherine 
>who in thier different ways are defending the 'enlightenment', show 
>an acceptable philosophical means of  addressing the extinction 
>event, which we should all realize by now makes facism and other 
>20th C despots like a relatively small scale problem then we may 
>begin to get somewhere....
>
>This doesn't seem to offer much hope.
>
>steve


Can you please clarify what you mean by "extinction" process and are 
you suggesting that unless we find a theoretical way of stopping mass 
extinction, we cannot speak affirmatively of Enlightenment?

There are two sides to this dialecticof extinction -- the ranks of 
the bourgeoisie have swelled in recent years with the 
industrialization of both China and India who feel that if a few 
species have to die out in order that they move out of rural poverty, 
so be it. -- Right now they may not be interested in ecology, but I'm 
sure that eco-tourism will soon be big there too. But a form of 
consciousness is emerging in these new classes that while 
individualistic and atomized also prizes the happiness of individuals 
-- which for Adorno was always the most important for happiness. His 
objection to cultural industry was not its individualism per se, 
because individualism is a historical category, but its 
pseudo-individualism.

I agree there is not much hope, but we are not hoping for the same 
things. From the long range view, mass extinctions have taken place 
periodically -- witness the end of the dinosaurs.

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-- 
Catherine Liu
Visiting Associate Professor
Film and Media / Visual Studies
235 Humanities Instructional Building
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA  92697-2435
tel: (949) 824-2428
fax: (949) 824-2464

http://www.higher-yearning.org/blog.html