Friday afternoon is Habermas Happy Hour here at millinerd. Warm up with Hart on Pinker, then read what the famous philosopher said in an interview quoted at The Chronicle:
For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or a catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.But what about the Greeks? According to Diogenes Allen, the Greek notion of justice, even in its most exalted form as found in Plato, "failed to notice the distress of the helpless in a society in which 90 percent of the people were slaves."
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3 comments:
This is amazing. You just considerably improved the remainder of my Friday evening.
hope you're well!
Gaelan
A direct legacy? I suppose, if one takes that in the sense of "the corruption of the best is the worst."
Interesting. There's almost some sense of a modernist millennialism here. Instead of the Augustinian City of God a Humanist City of Progress? Robin Barnes has an interesting essay on the transition of apocalyptic language in the 18th C. from religious to secular. He writes: 'Enlightenment conceptions of the apocalyptic birth pangs of the new age were reduced to insignificance. Historic Christianity was one of several major stages in the education of humanity, which had begun with human life itself and would culminate in the supreme and final understanding. This image of world history as a process of education was broadly revealed in a more benign conception of God's paternal role...'
'Many Enlightenment theorists of history in effect simply reversed the traditional Danielic vision of world-historical descent through four monarchies; the new model was one of ascent to a golden age of reason. Again, this approach had important roots in Joachimism and especially in Calvinist meliorism. In its most zealous devotees, however, historical progress was divorced from transcendent guidance.' (Barnes, Robin. “Images of Hope and Despair: Western Apocalypticism: ca. 1500-1800.” In The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, edited by Bernard McGinn, 143-184. New York: Continuum, 1998. p. 176)
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