This all gets off the ground with the fact that many Enlightenment philosophers held racist views. Quotes are not hard to find and Bouie finds many of them. But more interesting is why they held these views.
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Certainly it is not surprising that men in the 17th and 18th century held these views. Very few doubted racial hierarchy. What is more interesting is the relationship between such racial beliefs and core Enlightenment principles. 3
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This is not ultimately a conversation about men who lived 300yrs ago. It’s a conversation about us. If we take on Enlightenment principles, do we commit ourselves to racist or hierarchical views? This is the core question. 4
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If core Enlightenment principles *logically entail* racist or hierarchical views then the answer is yes. If one view entails another, then we cannot coherently accept one view and not another. So that would be a major objection to Enlightenment thought. 5
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If there is no entailment then the fact that Enlightenment philosophers accepted racist views is more or less an accident of history more to do with when they were born than their basic philosophical world view. 6
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In the latter case we contemporaries are free to borrow Enlightenment principles and jettison outdated racial beliefs. So no one need commit themselves to racism by committing themselves to the Enlightenment. 7
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Replying to @DavidOttlinger @HeerJeet
speaking only for myself, the takeaway here should be interrogating the extent to which the ideas and ideologies that grow out of the enlightenment contain race thinking (or misogynist thinking or classist thinking) and work to decolonize the ideas we like of those elements
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I mean, Marx himself is a child of the enlightenment. i don’t think we can escape it! it simply is. now, there are certainly alternatives to its most influential progeny, liberalism.
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Right -- I think all the major critics of both liberalism & Enlightenment (on both left & right) have absorbed lessons from them, so there is no escape from their legacies.
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Would you say that the inescapability is a good thing or a bad thing?
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Replying to @DavidOttlinger @HeerJeet and
Why does it have to be one or the other, straightforwardly?
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