re: #507 Cato the Elder

I’m sorry, but the “perfectibility of man” played a huge role, and that is something to which I do not hold.

Nor do you, apparently.

But it is perhaps the most dangerous notion ever conceived, and it’s still with us, in both rationalistic and religious guise.

I don’t believe we really have a conflict, we just approach the subject from radically different angles.

That’s fine. But you have a habit of positing the Enlightenment as something that was a coherent doctrine, where it was a breaking open of new doctrines. Of course some of those ideas are going to be dangerous, and wrong, and all the rest. But the Enlightenment gave us the tools to start sorting through ideas, testing them for reality, for soundness, for practicality. The idea that we should act according to reason does not mean that reason is assumed to be perfect; the mere process of science for the natural philosophers made it obvious to them that reason wasn’t perfect, and very few believed it was more than theoretically perfectible.

Remember, that was the time period of the argument between the rationalists and the empiricists, between nature and nurture. It wasn’t any period of monolithic thought.

And the perfectibility of man predates the age of reason by a long time; it was cast in religious terms before— a shriven soul, the perfection of the mind and spirit in communion with god, and merely the concept of god as a sentient being all contain the ideas of the perfection of a mind.