Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Pinker’s Enlightenment has little in common with the much more interesting intellectual movement that historically existed. Yet in A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), Hume wrote: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Hume believed being reasonable meant accepting the limits of reason, and so too, in quite different ways, did later Enlightenment rationalists such as Keynes and Freud. He tell us that the Enlightenment is defined by a “non-negotiable” commitment to reason. Pinker barely mentions Hume, and the omission is not accidental. It was the sceptical Scottish philosopher who stirred Immanuel Kant – whose well-known essay on Enlightenment Pinker quotes reverently at the start of the book – from what Kant described as his “dogmatic slumber”. By any standards, David Hume was one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers. Similarly, you don’t need to bother about what the Enlightenment was actually like. All you need do is consult a dictionary, and you will find that religion is – by definition – irrational. There is no need to trouble yourself with the arguments of historians, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, who treat religion as a highly complex phenomenon, serving a variety of human needs. Early on in this monumental apologia for a currently fashionable version of Enlightenment thinking, he writes: “To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason.” Well, it’s good to have that settled once and for all. “Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable.” Steven Pinker is fond of definitions.
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