Would you like to know the Truth?

One of the more surprising and exciting parallels between comic books and dramaturgy is the shared cultural intentions. Stan Lee, for example, speaks of a liberal inclusivity that echoes Diderot, and recognises art (in his case, comic books) as a medium for presenting philosophical ideas. The Fantastic Four, however, continue to express a very familiar ethos even into the 1990s, as in a scene from issue 511.

The Four are invited to stay in heaven - which Reed Richards calls 'the province of ultimate knowledge'. They decline, stating that 'we are not yet done exploring.'

And here are Lessing's thoughts on the matter.

If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say: Father, I will take this one—the pure Truth is for You alone.

–Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Anti-Goetze: Eine Duplik (1778) in: Werke vol. 8, pp. 32-33 (H. Göpfert ed. 1979)(S.H. transl.)

Reed Richards rejects the 'pure truth' for a 'diligent drive for Truth'. Two hundred years after Lessing, a quartet of characters are still waving the Enlightenment standard. The quest to rescue The Thing from death becomes a parable for the relationship between humans, God and Truth.

Yeah, studying comics is just like reading The Beano. 

I Read a Book About The Enlightenment...

It's the period of history that everyone's talking about! It's either the moment when humans stopped acting like kids, or the reduction of all reality to a series of commodities... depends on who you ask, really. But here are five things about the Enlightenment that I pulled out of my critical rucksack.

It's the age of reason
This is the classic claim for the eighteenth century, and the one that sticks. Generally, this has been seen as a good thing: Enlightenment thinkers aren't interested in faith or authority, they like to think about stuff. However, this isn't as simple as it seems. The ambition to apply reason to ideas means that there was plenty of argument, and a fundamental belief - that reason is the best thing ever - doesn't receive that much critique. 'Reasonable' can end up being like 'Christian', a word that isn't always used to mean the same thing. 

They liked a bit of science
In the previous century, the scientific method had caused a revolution in the way that the Universe was being investigated. This encouraged the Enlightenment to apply a more scientific approach to sociology, frequently invoking science to justify their descriptions of human behaviour. 

They invented branding
Although the French philosophes did hang out together, Enlightenment was a buzzword, and writers would slip it into conversation to prove that they were in the gang. This did mean it was easy enough for its enemies to point out their opposition, but it also meant that the wider movement got more hits than individual thinkers. 

It was cosmopolitan
Being a cross-European business, there was less of the nationalism and more of the hands across borders - they were even pretty positive about African and especially Chinese culture. This respect for different societies - despite the odd racist freak-out - made the Enlightenment one of the first movements to have an inclusive philosophy (although Christianity, The Roman Empire and Islam might all dispute this, since they had Universal aims too).

It was about growing up
Kant said that it was about casting off the oppression of authority, of maturing. The rejection of tradition and religion was an attempt to make humans act like adults, and not cower in fear at a set of rules made up by a father-figure (like God or the King, or Aristotle)

The Age of Reason

So... this is difficult. My research into dramaturgy has led me to the

eighteenth century, the 'Age of Enlightenment'. I am reading Diderot, Rosseau and a 1960s' Time/Life book that has lots of pictures of men in wigs. It might be a coincidence, but the legacy of that era seems to be turning up in the debates on YouTube. 

I call them debates, but that's generous. 

To reduce it down to a caricature, one group are progressive liberals, who support a variety of interest groups (including feminists, anti-racists and LGBTQI activists). Their opposition is a broad spectrum of conservatives and right-wing video-bloggers, who reject what they see as a 'social justice crusade'. In this conflict, there are arguments about the shape society ought to take, and the notion of 'Western Civilisation' is a hot topic. 

They accuse each other of racism quite a bit. 

Esoteric as it might seem (or, an attempt to claim that my research is relevant to everything, ever), the legacy of the Enlightenment

looms large in the discussion. Some conservatives even refer to themselves as 'classic liberals', harking back to Adam Smith. A recent article in The Telegraph claims that students at The School of African and Oriental Studies wanted to kick Kant off the curriculum. My own fatuous introduction to The Dialectic of Enlightenment addresses a text that might lurk behind much of the progressive agenda, since it attacks philosophy's bias towards oppression.

Interestingly, both sides of the discussion feature many atheists. It's almost as if this is a debate about how a post-religious society might move towards building a society based not on divine law but rational thought. If they'd all stop shouting, mind.

Much of my reading into the eighteenth century offers a similar scenario: following on from the success of the scientific method, many philosophers wanted to shift the state from its alliance with religion - a task most urgent in France, where the Vatican was in cahoots with the monarchy - and encourage, to paraphrase Kant, the species to grow up and stop using God as a father-figure.

The Enlightenment vision was not as simply rational as its

supporters might suggest: while it did place reason at the centre of its discourse, it manifested in different ways across Europe. Although some thinkers, like Voltaire or Diderot, advocated anti-clerical or atheistic positions, others, like my hero Lessing, maintained an interest in applying reason not to destroy theology but adapting religious belief. However, the shared concerned with the importance of reason over blind faith and tradition, as well as a politically motivated application of reason could be interpreted as marking a decisive change in the focus and function of philosophy. 

Both sides in the YouTube/Social Media war appear to be following certain Enlightenment principles: the conservative bloc aims to establish Western Civilisation as the product of reason and science, while the progressives are advancing the critique of society that evolved in the run-up to the French revolutions. The former emphasise the conclusions of the philosophers, the latter, the spirit.

The Dialects of Having A Big Fight about Ideas

It's the battle of the millennium! 

In the Red Corner, that Terrific Tag Team of Cultural Marxism: Adorno and Horkheimer! These guys just don't know when to quit, and their Dialectic of Enlightenment has been blamed for everything from Hilary Clinton through to post-modernism! 

And in the Blue Corner, it's the entirety of Western Philosophy! When Addy and Horky hit out at the consequences of the Enlightenment, it wasn't enough for them to have a crack at the philosophes of the eighteenth century: they squared up against Martin Luther, Bacon, Plato - anyone who had done anything to undermine the animistic vision of the university and replace it with cold, hard facts (as long as they could be used for a profit!)! 

Round One

In The Concept of Enlightenment, the red boys have set out their stall early. 'The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths... Enlightenment is totalitarian' (pages 3-6). Pulling in references to Plato's preoccupation with Ideas as Numbers (page 7), Martin Luther's belief that knowledge without purpose is a bit of a slut (page 5) and the reduction of nature to the service of mankind (page 8), they point out that both the Jewish Genesis and the Greek philosophers were already staking out nature as the property of... the humans.

It's a beautiful, rhetorical and polemical attack: a blizzard of concepts that sketches out an entire history of oppression, but somewhere, the Enlightenment gets lost in the mix. It's a strange start, not to actually mention any of the big names of the eighteenth century in an essay intending to take down the underpinning of the Age of Reason. Rather, Adorno and Horkheimer have a right go at the evolution of a particular way of thinking which results, frankly, in capitalism. I'm not sure, in retrospect, that communists moaning about the exclusion of magic and metaphysics makes much sense, nor the dismissive attitude towards humanism. 

I'm an anti-humanist myself, but what would socialism be without the human dimension. Oh - that's right... a totalitarian state that subsumes personal freedom for the 'progress of history'. Any kulaks fancying commenting on how that works out? 

Result: bit of a below the belt reply there: the Stalinist purges weren't common knowledge when Dialect was first published in the 1940s, and it's not like they were advising Stalin. It's a all a bit - my system. love it or leave it, really. 

Still, Adorno and Horkheimer have got it all to do now. Fair play placing The Age of Reason within a broader context, but instead of being able to, say, have a crack at Voltaire and Diderot, they have some big additional players to consider. 

Round Two

Adorno and Horkheimer are standing in the centre of the ring and screaming. There's something about the difference between magic and science, representation and specifics... atoms, rabbits, ritual and plunder. 

The other philosophers are looking at their shoes. the words 'magic is utterly untrue' get a nod of recognition, but the whole of pages 9, 10 and 11 are incoherent, thanks to the density of the thought. They might be saying that magical rituals recognised individual objects as being representatives of a category. Maybe they are trying to expose the mythology that sustains the privilege of rational thought. 

In the meantime, Plato has wandered off to do some sums and Martin Luther is nailing his own foot to the canvas. 'It distracts me from the pain in the hoop this pair are giving me.'

Result: Derrida would have a field day with this. Unfortunately for me, the mentions of mimesis and representation means that this is probably part of the essay I am going to need to understand. They are probably trying to postulate two modes of thinking - magical and rational - and suggesting that magical thinking is less alienated than the rational, in so far as it offers the subject (some bloke dressed up) an identification with the object (the universe): the human is part of the cosmos. The Enlightenment, on the other hand, presents a power relationship between subject and object (the subject having replaced his funky shaman outfit with a white lab coat).