The Nature/Freedom RGM of The Enlightenment
The spiritual warfare to displace a pock-marked Christianity from its formative power over society and daily life, also individual consciences, was an RGM called "the Enlightenment." From early on and throughout its development, the Enlightenment was itself torn within by two contending devotions. One was the devotion to Nature, conceived as a deterministic universe a Nature-only earthly existence and a mundane life often struggling to overcome a sense of banality and ennui; the other was the parallel and antagonistic devotion to an absolutized quest from Freedom. In Dooyeweerd's view, this internal struggle has tossed European, and then Western thought more widely conceived, back and forth, as though it were on a swinging pendulum that first favoured one of the two absolute values, then devolving along its trajectory to a bottom-most point, only to climb again to the opposite highpoint of the ever-recurring swing between Nature and Freedom. Dooyeweerd held that all prominent philosophers attempted to account for both sides of this dualistic RGM, but usually have explained one of the options in a minor key in terms of the other which then would constitute the major key for the given philosopher. The shifts of the internal dynamics of the Enlightenment RGM, however, are not philosophical shifts alone. Philosophy only gives a certain formal theoretical expression to the cultural tension of its three-hundred-or-so years as the hegemonic religious ground motive of Western culture, to the present. In this situation, Jews and Christians have had to find their ways of surviving within the continuously expanding Enlightenment culture that brought both Hitler and Stalin to power in the most devastating ways.
Read more about this topic: Religious Ground Motive
Famous quotes containing the words the nature, nature and/or freedom:
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“It is in the nature of allegory, as opposed to symbolism, to beg the question of absolute reality. The allegorist avails himself of a formal correspondence between “ideas” and “things,” both of which he assumes as given; he need not inquire whether either sphere is “real” or whether, in the final analysis, reality consists in their interaction.”
—Charles, Jr. Feidelson, U.S. educator, critic. Symbolism and American Literature, ch. 1, University of Chicago Press (1953)
“In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father’s house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband’s is almost a cloister.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)