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For communitarians and conservatives, relativism is only dubious when individuals make individual moral decisions. Sometimes, as the USA has found in respect of the issue of race, the state has to actively protect the individual from the community. By contrast, groups are often rather dubious things, which have a tendency to turn on some of their members, and to be especially negative about those who don’t belong at all. X. Liberalism is not necessarily, and, for me, should not be, about promoting a minimal state, so much as attempting to remove those barriers to the full flourishing of the individual which cripple so many lives in our grossly unequal societies. The horror kicks in because without some overarching notion of justice, it’s difficult to articulate any defence of those who are on the receiving end of the repression. In his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) Kant helpfully summed up the basic idea thus: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. The consequence of this thinking was to empower Western imperialism to continue its repressive and destructive ways, underpinned by an apparently liberal ideology of individual rights. The illusion comes from the fact that to see any past moment as one of unanimity and social peace is to have no knowledge of history (Gray makes this point himself in his critique of communitarian philosophy). Early flash points included Edmund Burke’s denunciation of what he saw as the hubris of reason leading to the horror of the Terror during the French revolution. Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the editors of the Encyclopedia all argued that women should play an active political role. Yet ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ give us carte blanche to ride roughshod over the traditions, customs and political institutions of any group not deemed to live up to our standards. In a sense, ‘cultural imperialism’ is an easier accusation to understand than that of moral scepticism and relativism. Enlightenment liberals have no difficulty in holding a regime to an ideal standard of tolerance, but for Gray and communitarians such as MacIntyre, there are no such standards to apply. Which of the following statements is true of an urna that can be seen on the statues of the Buddha? According to Gray in Two Faces of Liberalism, (2000), at best reason can lead us only to a ‘modus vivendi’ – a kind of agreement to differ amongst people with incommensurable values – rather than to the kind of consensus of values dreamt of by liberals such as John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1972). This site uses cookies to recognize users and allow us to analyse site usage. Once it had undermined the pretensions of earlier dogmatic beliefs, the field should have been open for a liberation of thought and morality from the notion of certainty itself. On the one hand, the Enlightenment delivered the goods in terms of our technical understanding of the world and our capacity to manipulate it. Thus we can see that the charge of relativism, long levelled at liberals, is actually true of their accusers. One wonders for example how Gray might respond to the execution of homosexuals in Iran. Not as much as some people think, says Phil Badger . This charge is explicitly levelled by MacIntyre in his book After Virtue (1984), where he calls for a return to a morality in which virtue, defined by shared cultural norms, is the guiding ideal of human life. That being the case, for 99% of those people, one of the following is true: (a) They believe to be more advanced on the path than they actually are. The problem with this option is that it doesn’t do much for the cause of tolerance we have been discussing. It is strange indeed to think of an injunction to think for ourselves as the source of so much trouble, and tempting to mount a defence of it which is polemical and facetious. For Nietzsche, and later, his postmodernist disciples, the failure of the Enlightenment was a failure of philosophical courage. In time, these new systems of thought themselves became ossified myths (in postmodernist terms, ‘metanarratives’) acting to restrict the capacities of human beings to define their own identities and realities. For now, the central point is that the meaning of our lives, however informed by social practice, custom, and so on, sometimes transcends such contexts. For liberals, what we are and what we choose to be are things which states, communities and institutions have no business regulating, save to the extent that our choices and natures impinge on others. The id is no child of reason, and reason was just not up to the philosophical job of doing anything else than rationalising and excusing its petulance. Many figures could be taken to embody the core themes of Enlightenment thought, but one, Immanuel Kant did so to such an extent that his ideas have become synonymous with it. My liberalism, then, is what is usually referred to as ‘progressive’; but that’s an issue for a different time. It also heralded a new understanding of the significance of the individual, who could now be seen as equipped to decide matters of both empirical fact and moral value for himself (‘herself’ came a bit later). This is the ‘liberalism’ of Kant. The problem with this, from the standpoint of both conservatives and communitarians, is that once we have abstracted out all the particular or culturally-specific features of an individual, we’re not left with a disinterested and objective seeker of justice, but with no individual at all. Three possible ways forward suggest themselves. We have seen how these charges have curiously similar origins. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Spirit of the Laws, Vindication of the Rights of Women was written by. The subsequent two and a quarter centuries have witnessed variations upon the same arguments, proposed from a bewilderingly diverse range of perspectives. In fact, despite their differences, the critics of Enlightenment philosophy share a common distrust of its core idea of the individual. Firstly, there is the old Kantian/Rawlsian approach based on principles of justice discoverable by universal reason. Almost immediately, intellectual battle lines began to be drawn up between those who championed the new ideas, and those who saw them as ill-conceived and dangerous. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.”. A. The Constitution of the Global Axis of Time and its Apocalyptic End. Value pluralism only really works at the level of the individual, because accepting intolerant values at the level of the group means accepting that some of the individuals in the group are going to be discriminated against.

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