Good Example Of The Portable Enlightenment Reader Journal Entry Essay

As a seminal international intellectual movement, the Enlightenment focused on rationality and the notion of progress in order to advance empiricism, science, social organization, and technology in order to ameliorate the human condition. The application of technology and science would bolster the quality of life of people vis-à-vis economic development and modernization, which is intrinsically linked with industrialization. Indeed, several philosophes commented on the human mind and human rationality in relation to the notion of barbarism. Indeed, barbarism occupies a central category of Enlightenment epistemology regarding barbarism, civilization, and primitivism. Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality” and Kant’s “Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose” proffers a narrative on human progress as well as an edification of social structures that takes the notion of barbarism into consideration. Barbarous societies have transcended the primitivism but still lack the infrastructure and institutions that are hallmark characteristics of civil society such as a market economy, an elected government, and an independent judiciary. Indeed, a barbarous society is suspended in a liminal state. Modern and pre-modern societies are differentiated by the fact that pre-modern states lack justice and equality.
Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, a French philosopher and mathematician, proffered a summary of Enlightenment and attitudes in his potion of the renowned encyclopedia by Diderot. D’Alembert traces the development of the human mind and rationality, asserting that the human mind once it escaped barbarism was kept in a state of infancy and was passionate about imbibing philosophical ideas yet could not retain formation because of its infallibility. Both Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alebert expounded profoundly on the subject of raising the human spirit from barbarism. D’Alembert declared that “liberty of action and thought alone is capable of producing great thingsand liberty requires only enlightenment to preserve it from excess.” D’Alembert further describes the renowned scholar Rene Descartes as a rebellious hero who first had the audacity to “show intelligent minds how to throw off the yoke of scholasticism, of opinion, of authority—in a word, of prejudices and barbarismHe can be thought of as a leader of conspirators who, before anyone else, had the courage to arise against a despotic and arbitrary power and who, in preparing a resounding revolution, laid the foundations of a more just and happier government which he himself was not able to see established.” Barbarism was defeated by the age of reason, but this triumph over scholarly despotism suggests that there were still a litany of battles and fights to win vis-à-vis the cooperation of intelligent men against the despotic forces of barbaric oppression and despotism. Victory over barbaric and repressive forces was critical in order to reform the flawed human condition.
As a result, throughout d’Alembert’s work it is evident that he practices his own philosophy of intellectual autonomy. Theology, which was once the most revered branches of the sciences, is rendered by him an inferior offshoot of philosophical epistemologies. Indeed, he refers to God as an absurd abstraction gleaned from empirical the sense while all other elements of religiosity are eschewed. D’Alembert underscored that human rationality sprang forth from barbarism, a sentiment that s reiterated time and again by Enlightenment philosophers and in modern epistemologies.