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The left hand of the Enlightenment : truth, error, and integrity in Bayle and Kant

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vanderLugt_2018_HEI_LeftHand_AAM.pdf (661.0Kb)
Date
26/02/2018
Author
van der Lugt, Mara
Keywords
Pierre Bayle
Immanuel Kant
Conscience
Sincerity
Integrity
Authenticity
B Philosophy (General)
BL Religion
D History (General)
T-NDAS
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Abstract
Taking its cue from Hannah Arendt's comment that 'truth gets lost in the Enlightenment' and Lessing's parable of God's 'left hand', this paper traces a historical shift in moral and religious thought: roughly from truth to sincerity. From traditional conceptions of conscience as conditional on the objective truth of its content, the paper moves on, via the Reformation and seventeenth-century Augustinian turn, to early modern debates on toleration and the 'erring conscience'. It is argued that Pierre Bayle's Commentaire Philosophique of 1686 can be read as a crucial catalogue for understanding the substitution of truth with sincerity (and error): so that not truth but truthfulness is considered to be essential for moral and religious justification. Moving from Bayle to Immanuel Kant, the paper then shows how many of the same questions rise in Kant's late essay on theodicy, which is also an essay on sincerity or integrity, via the Book of Job. Through these two thinkers, various themes are connected: from conscience and sincerity to the problem of the conscientious persecutor. Finally, these themes of truth, error and integrity are linked to the modern debate on authenticity, and a framework is proposed for conceptualising these various shifts.
Citation
van der Lugt , M 2018 , ' The left hand of the Enlightenment : truth, error, and integrity in Bayle and Kant ' , History of European Ideas , vol. 44 , no. 3 , pp. 277-291 . https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1440045
Publication
History of European Ideas
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1440045
ISSN
0191-6599
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1440045
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18371

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