Enlightenment

About: Enlightenment is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6845 publications have been published within this topic receiving 116832 citations.

Jainism: An Introduction

Abstract: Jainism evokes images of monks wearing face-masks to protect insects and mico-organisms from being inhaled. Or of Jains sweeping the ground in front of them to ensure that living creatures are not inadvertently crushed: a practice of non-violence so radical as to defy easy comprehension. Yet for all its apparent exoticism, Jainism is still little understood in the West. What is this mysterious philosophy which originated in the 6th century BCE, whose absolute requirement is vegetarianism, and which now commands a following of four million adherents both in its native India and diaspora communities across the globe?In his welcome new treatment of the Jain religion, Long makes an ancient tradition fully intelligible to the modern reader. Plunging back more than two and a half millennia, to the plains of northern India and the life of a prince who - much like the Buddha - gave up a life of luxury to pursue enlightenment, Long traces the history of the Jain community from founding sage Mahavira to the present day. He explores asceticism, worship, the life of the Jain layperson, relations between Jainism and other Indic traditions, the Jain philosophy of relativity, and the implications of Jain ideals for the contemporary world. The book presents Jainism in a way that is authentic and engaging to specialists and non-specialists alike.

Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics

Abstract: William Keach. Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. 191. $42.00. In his ambitious and brilliantly argued new book, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics, William Keach surveys familiar terrain--the politics of canonical British Romantic poetry--with a sense of purpose that follows directly from the terms of his title. The political dimensions of Romantic poetry are rigorously studied here within the medium of language, considered first through Romantic and earlier Enlightenment linguistic theories, and then through the traces that such theories (and the concerns they raised) may be said to have left on the style of the major Romantic writers. In an earlier book, Shelley's Style (1984), Keach established himself as one of our most sensitive and insightful readers of Romantic writing. In welcoming the wider scope of this new study--in addition to Shelley, there are sustained considerations of Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, and Keats--readers will find that Keach is as discriminating a student of class idioms and gender codes as he is of couplet structure and ottava rima form. He is also refreshingly direct about matters of literary-political value, and his willingness to admire Byron's materialism and Shelley's hesitation about direct action while taking a dim view of Blake's representations of political violence may well prove controversial. But the array of sensitive readings marshaled in support of closely argued judgments make this book impossible to ignore. At one point Keach takes Francis Jeffrey to task for a "vaguely generalizing" (53) response to Keats' Endymion: by contrast, he himself seems incapable of any critical response that is not as precisely formulated as it is vividly communicated. The opening chapter, "Arbitrary Power," introduces the central term that links power and language throughout the book, along with a telling paradox about its application and historical development. For it turns out that the "discourse of the arbitrary" (1) that traverses politics and linguistics over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discloses "something arbitrary about the word arbitrary itself, something inherently and inescapably contradictory" (2). This instability hinges on the question of whether "arbitrary" identifies despotically determined will or rather indeterminate and unpredictable chance. The issue is important for Keach not simply because it cuts across two distinct flames of reference (politics and language) that are central to any understanding of Romantic literary institutions and practices, but also because it indicates something distinctive about the historical operation of those institutions and practices: What I want to insist on here is that in both political and linguistic frames of reference it is not only the doubleness of the arbitrary--its signifying at once absolute determination and utter indeterminacy--that characterizes the problematic I am attempting to define. It is also the interaction between the terms of the doubleness--the historical and social processes through which what is initially random and contingent becomes absolute, or conversely through which absolute will and authority give way to the random and contingent. (4) Beginning (as he ends) with Shelley, whose Defence of Poetry proposes that "language is arbitrarily produced by the Imagination," and deftly orchestrating a range of other poets and theorists, Keach first establishes the terms for the arbitrary Romantic sign by reading back to Locke and to Enlightenment conceptions of language and power, rather than following his own first impulse "to read forward and see Shelley anticipating a central tenet of Saussurian and post-Saussurian linguistic theory" (2). Yet the introductory chapter does move on to Saussure, Derrida, de Man, Chomsky, Bourdieu and others, showing how Enlightenment and Romantic treatments of the arbitrary sign in relation to arbitrary power "have persisted and confounded efforts to relate language as a formal system to its social origins, functions, and meanings" (6). …

Between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Music History:"First Viennese Modernism" and the Delayed Nineteenth Century

Abstract: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the traditional periodization of European music between 1700 and 1975——late Baroque; Classical; Romantic; modern——seems increasingly problematic. In place of the outmoded concept of "Classical Style" for Viennese music before and after 1800, I suggest "First Viennese Modernism." The argument comprises three stages: 1. A survey of music-historical periodizations of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, together with comments on the current status of periodistic thinking in musicology in general. It is argued that with respect to European music as a whole, the older sense of "Baroque" lasting until ca. 1750 is untenable; it is better to understand a distinct period ca. 1720-80, centering around the Enlightenment, the galant, the international "system" of Italian opera, and (toward the end) the cult of sensibility. The consequence is that the years before and after 1800 must be understood as a period in their own right. 2. An interpretation of Viennese music during those years as an "emphatic" modernism. Its continuities with later nineteenth-century music are stressed. Each term in the concept "First Viennese Modernism" is critical: "First," to distinguish it from the Schoenberg school; "Viennese," to distinguish its modest and local origins from its later dominance of the entire European continent; and "modernism," on four grounds: (a) its contemporary reception; (b) its status as the earliest repertory to have been cultivated unbroken from its own time to ours; (c) its status as the first autonomous (not primarily mimetic) instrumental music and as the earliest self-problematizing music; (d) its participation in the creation of modern (post-revolutionary) history, by means of what is (synecdochically) interpreted as Haydn9s sublime, in the Kantian sense. 3. A brief account of the crucial role of the 1790s in these developments, focusing on the complementary achievements of Haydn and Beethoven. For Beethoven, Haydn9s and Mozart9s music was, precisely, modern. Together, he and Haydn dominated the Viennese scene, producing ever-more-imposing masterworks in every genre except opera. This explicitly modernist orientation was fostered, if not indeed in part created, by their patrons. After 1800 Beethoven maintained and further developed this same tradition. These years "between" Enlightenment and Romanticism were no mere transition; they constituted an equally weighty phase, on the same historical-structural "level," as those that preceded and followed it. Concomitantly, Romanticism as such did not become predominant in music until 1815, in Viennese music (except for the Lied) perhaps not even until 1828/30. For both reasons, it makes sense to regard the beginning of the music-historical nineteenth century as having been "delayed," until around 1815 or 1830.