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Elephants and turtles: Difference between revisions
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Without God the enlightened western intellectual tradition needed to rebase all these organising principles from scratch: to ditch ''one'' Big Idea, it needed to replace it with ''another''. A ''new'' Big Idea was there, waiting to take over, at the moment the old one fell back lifeless on Charles Darwin’s specimen table. The New Big Idea was, of course, the enlightenment scientific tradition itself. Rationalism. Now, here is an interesting thing: what if the very idea that there must ''be'' a Big Idea, at all, is a function of the ''Old'' Big Idea — the one that just joined the choir invisible? Was Rationalism, in a profound way, utterly bound to the intellectual mores from whose surly bonds it slipped? | Without God the enlightened western intellectual tradition needed to rebase all these organising principles from scratch: to ditch ''one'' Big Idea, it needed to replace it with ''another''. A ''new'' Big Idea was there, waiting to take over, at the moment the old one fell back lifeless on Charles Darwin’s specimen table. The New Big Idea was, of course, the enlightenment scientific tradition itself. Rationalism. Now, here is an interesting thing: what if the very idea that there must ''be'' a Big Idea, at all, is a function of the ''Old'' Big Idea — the one that just joined the choir invisible? Was Rationalism, in a profound way, utterly bound to the intellectual mores from whose surly bonds it slipped? | ||
For now, hold that thought, for the Big Ideas that rushed in to replace God ''all'' did all cleave, strongly to the notion that ''there must be a Big Idea''. Science could yield ''physical'' truth about the world, but not ''moral'' truth. Making an is from an ought is tricky. The attempts to do so — to imagine a utopian future derived from the rational precepts of enlightenment, and free of the mysticism of turtles, elephants, geometrically illogical trinities and so forth, dependent only upon the scientific method, we call [[modernism]]. | For now, hold that thought, for the Big Ideas that rushed in to replace God ''all'' did all cleave, strongly to the notion that ''there must be a Big Idea''. Science could yield ''physical'' truth about the world, but not ''moral'' truth. Making an [[David Hume|is from an ought]] is tricky. The attempts to do so — to imagine a utopian future derived from the rational precepts of enlightenment, and free of the mysticism of turtles, elephants, geometrically illogical trinities and so forth, dependent only upon the scientific method, we call [[modernism]]. | ||
Science provided the foundation for physical truth, but needed rationalist programmes to coordinate the moral components. New Big Ideas were needed, and before long they presented themselves. In the early twentieth century there were two, both were as utopian, as they were disastrous. Between them, we can see the birth, and immediate crisis of, [[Modernism|modernity]]. | Science provided the foundation for physical truth, but needed rationalist programmes to coordinate the moral components. New Big Ideas were needed, and before long they presented themselves. In the early twentieth century there were two, both were as utopian, as they were disastrous. Between them, we can see the birth, and immediate crisis of, [[Modernism|modernity]]. | ||