How would the enlightenment thinkers feel if they were to be transported to, for example, modern-day America? How would Kant feel? Would he experience deep, piercing regret, or would a wave of pride wash over him?
How would the enlightenment thinkers feel?
Probably the latter. They would be glad that the Revolution has achieved so much but would also think that there's still a lot to be done.
they would kill themselves immediately
I think pretty much everyone who died prior to WW2 would kill themselves at the sight of the world today
They would be absolutely mortified. A decent amount of them would become despondent over the absolute state of Europe at the moment.
The worthwhile ones, like Spinoza and Hobbes, would belatedly take up the cause of the Counter-Enlightenment.
The intellectual lightweights, like Leibniz and Jefferson, would excuse themselves from public life indefinitely.
While the certifiable morons, such as Tom Paine and Diderot, would likely take a bath with a toaster.
Kant would simply return to hikikomori.
>Counter-Enlightenment
What I wouldn't give to see something like that happen. In fact, I'll start. I'll write about it.
Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Diderot are some of the few that would actually be very happy with how the world ended up
He'd say the Enlightenment failed, most people don't give a frick about learning or government or duty or morals or religion, and they are incapable of thinking about matters beyond their immediate needs and wants. This has rendered the majority unsuitable for self-directed rule and will lead to the return of absolutist states in order to undo the damage done by mass idiocy and stupidity.
>He'd say the Enlightenment failed, most people don't give a frick about learning or government or duty or morals or religion, and they are incapable of thinking about matters beyond their immediate needs and wants. This has rendered the majority unsuitable for self-directed rule and will lead to the return of absolutist states in order to undo the damage done by mass idiocy and stupidity.
Yes, democracy and freedom are fruitless without a culture permeated by virtue and transcendent moral principles. Capitalism, despite its many, many successes, doesn't bring out the best within men, quite the opposite, to be frank.
Modernity could've been so much greater.
On paper it sounded good, but ultimately if the people the state is composed if are shit, no then no matter how elegant the government apparatus is, we the people gon frick it up.
Well, things were going great until... you know...
>hehehe in my fantasy smart people agree with me...who's the loser now?
- Amazed at advances in tech/medicine
- Shocked at how dead religion is
- Nobody gives a shit about morality or ideals anymore
- Upset the aristocracy is dead, depressed that the "upper class" is full of high-conscientiousness midwits
- Upset that the Aristotelian-style harmony of all branches of knowledge completely failed & only hard sciences are taken seriously
- Depressed over the evolution of universities
The smart ones would realize all this was more or less inevitable. Honestly I think they would be shilling Christianity as the solution.
It's all going according to plan.
E Pluribus unum = new tower of babel
Thomas Jefferson would view modern Americans as feudal serfs, which we are. The US national debt has doubled in the past 10 years and the government is simultaneously increasing the debt at break neck speed by giving trillions to Ukraine an Israel, using taxes to service debts, and printing money, thus making your savings irrelevant. It's the biggest heist in history. You will own nothing, you won't get a cent of social security, and you will work until you drop dead like a good little peasant.
Based. This poster is based. I'd vote for him (if the homosexuals in swing states could accurately count votes).
After 1812 Jefferson became blackpilled on everything he wrote and accepted Hamilton was right. You can see him rebuking his own moronic schools late in life
They would be displeased at the amount of Black folk
Enlightenment ideals were only ever intended to apply to white men, so obviously they would be immediately disgusted by seeing all the brown faces on every single street. But even just among their fellow whites they would be pretty shocked at the decline in morality and erudition.
Most of them would have a feeling of grief and horror. If you actually read these guys, modernity isn’t remotely like what they envisioned.
What did they envision?
Greece and Rome if it was populated exclusively by Ciceros, Aristotles and Coriolani.
I think their first thought would be something along the lines of "Why are there so many brown people?"
>feel
AFFECTIVE STATES ARE FOR WOMEN
women bad mindset is for children with arrested mental development.
Sounds like someone has feelings.
your vitriol towards an entire gender is definitely motivated by feelings of resentment rather than rationale, so yeah.
*sex
>women bad mindset is for (women)
what did he mean by this?
Who should I read if I think the Enlightenment made a lot of sense but it doesn't make me feel good so I do not like it
They would claim real enlightment has never been tried.
I feel like you know the answer to that already, don't you?
What do you think? Do you honestly think any of these 18th/19th century luminaries would describe current-day Europe if you could ask them how they think the world will end up in 200 years? Kant was writing a pamphlet about perpetual peace between the nations of the Earth and in the meantime we've had the two biggest bloodbaths in human history.
To say nothing of the demographics of Europe, of course.
I think they would be horrified. Modern life in the 21st century is pretty much a disaster. This is just objectively true from every pre-modern point of view and most modern ones as well. We live in a world where the jobs are fake, nobody is actually free or self-sufficient, there’s no reason to write or make art since AI does it, where the food is fake and the water is literally filled with plastic and other chemicals, the natural world is polluted and made ugly, smooth steel and glass passes for architecture, social and romantic relationships are falling apart, our nations are led by shrill, shrieking women and caricatures of real men, everyone is obese. I mean, everything is pretty much terrible. We made life a lot longer and safer, if you manage to never have a car accident or die the likely death caused by a coronary that is, and in turn we’ve robbed life of all its sweetness. The only people who really ever get to taste how sweet life can be are the extremely wealthy and only in a strictly materialistic sense. So this really doesn’t even seem up for debate imo.
For all the talk of "he's overrated", Nietzsche is actually one of the few philosophers who made bold predictions that turned out to be true. In The Will to Power he talks about how 200 years of nihilism will envelop Europe, and we're halfway through at least. By contrast, guys like Kant would probably say we live in Utopia in 200 years. And guys like Schopenhauer would just have a quip about how life sucks now and it will suck 200 years from now. Nietzsche is the only one who actually has something substantive to say that turned out to be true, at least so far.
>hegel said that napoleon would conquer the world, convert to lutheranism, declare himself to be the israeli messiah, and institute mass liberal democracy for eternity
>he loses against vatniks, gets arrested by the brits, and then dies of diarrhea
Damn, you're onto something.
That reminds me, Schopenhauer also believed that the discovery & translation of Sanskrit texts would usher in a new Renaissance just like how the rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts led to the Italian Renaissance. Another failed prediction. Kant thought all the nations of the world would embrace the categorical imperative and we'd live in perpetual peace.
While Nietzsche, on the other hand, made some oddly specific predictions like that Russia would become the dominant player in European politics and that the next century would be the most bloody in human history. Writing in the long era of peace between Napoleon and WW1 (and WW2) that's quite impressive. No one predicted war in the late 1800s.
To be fair, all the nations of the world did accept the categorical imperative. It just has not led to peace.
Both Thomas Carlyle and Alexis de Tocqueville made the same prediction as Nietzsche.
Nobody really critiques Nietzsche for his takes on nihilism, the last men, not even his “God is dead” (taken to mean something “we’ve stopped believing in God”). What Nietzsche gets critiqued for are first of all his very lazy critiques of Christianity and his frankly ridiculous solutions and his grecophilia. Nietzsche had a good sense of the times he lived in and where things were going, but he was a lazy philosopher. He was a terrible philosopher actually. There’s a world of difference between having an intuitive sense of things and making sound arguments for what should be done. He had the former but failed to do the latter. But Spengler said more and said it better anyway. He said plainly that Westerners would come to despise the civilization they built for themselves.
Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modernity is by far the most accurate. It’s a culture of total self-renunciation. Every elevation of human prosperity and technology is degradation. There’s no hope for the future. Abandon all of it, ye who enter. Enjoy nothing the obesity, climate change, eradication of art and nothingness ahead.
They'd be overwhelmed by twerking tiktok girls and drill rap, turning into thc vapr addicted coomers