Did the enlightenment movement fail? If so, why?
Not really no.
If you mean it in the broad sense, the Scientific Revolution since Descartes has led to the period with by far the fastest scientific and technological progress in human history, and it's still going on today.
If you just mean the political Enlightenment of the 18th century, the ideas of Rousseau and other thinkers of the time still form the basis for our entire concept of nation-states, constitution, and laws since the French Revolution.
The only dent is that Enlightenment founded the Modern Era, and today we live in the Postmodern Era which is all about deconstructing everything including what Enlightenment has built. Still, there's nothing to replace it.
>>32016
Great analysis, I was going to memespout but your post convinced me not to.
>>31899
Go read Foucault and then suggest a proposition yourself.
>>32016
Sure we've got an intellectual elite but the majority of people are still disconnected from it and not intellectually mature, in the sense of thinking for themselves. Most people are specialists at best. On the other hand I guess it's hard to be anything but a specialist with the increasing entropy of our knowledge.
>>31899
There were many Enlightenments, the history of the world from 1789-1991 could be viewed a series of Enlightenment civil wars.
>>32075
this:
http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault.whatisenlightenment.en.html
maybe read kant first:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html
>>31899
We're still reaping the fruits of the Englightenment, but its ideals are fading. A few for the better, but most for the worst.
It's been two centuries since the French revolution. Ideas change, develop, old ones fade away and new ones spring up. The question is not how to preserve a past state because that is impossible. The question is how to best use past ideas to inform present ones. The greatest threat to the ideals of the enlightenment is that, on a mass scale, we are not doing that.
>>31899
The enlightenment movement is the troubled, nerdy son of the Italian Renaissance
>>32895
Do you think stuff like wikileaks is a restoration of those ideals?
>>33051
No, they're pretty unrelated. Renaissance Humanism was a reaction against medieval thought and science, and an attempt to return to worshiping ancient Greek and Roman authors. In science this meant worshiping Aristotle again, whom medieval natural philosophers had already moved beyond. This is why there was almost no scientific progress during the Renaissance, it was dominated by Humanism which was profoundly reactionary.
Enlightenment was in fact a reconnection with and continuation of medieval thought. Descartes, Galileo, Newton all built on the work of 14th century thinkers and discarded the Renaissance entirely.
Jews and muslims, of course.
>>33293
Reactionary to what? Reactionaries in the classical sense were loyalists to the aristocractic system during the french revolution.
>>33518
Being reactionary in the broad sense means reacting against some form of progress/evolution by wanting to return to a previous status quo.
Humanists were reactionary as they wanted to undo the progress of the Gothic Era and return to the early Middle Ages or Antiquity. They quite literally judged a text's value by its age.
>>31899
Yes, because they forgot to pay their utilities.
It failed in the sense that it was too successful.
>>34445
What do you mean? Like in the Ted Kacynski kind of sense that people are getting to comfortable to react?
