The end of enlightenment

We have thought about Trump and talked endlessly about the Trump phenomenon. What does it mean?  We are well aware of the links to Le Pen and Farage and no doubt others who represent a somewhat extreme right wing position. In many of our conversations we have struggled to make sense of the politics of these demagogues.

We found the following useful:

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/29/12930730/mark-lilla-revolution-donald-trump-radical-islam-europe

Also this. The title says it all, 'Trump's Theater of Cruelty':

https://itself.wordpress.com/2016/10/10/trumps-theater-of-cruelty/

And yet, something is missing. There is something 'cruelly' solipsistic' about these individuals, notwithstanding their appeal to a certain electorate. So the issue is how to relate this solipsism to the group.

There are two rather different referents to the meaning of enlightenment. It can denote a move to individualism, and all that that signifies, such as the sovereignty of the consumer.

It can also denote the primacy of rationality without the backing of a religious foundation.

Kant is the supreme modern philosopher of this. He writes in the Critique of Pure Reason of a world that is mind dependent:

"... if I remove the thinking subject, the whole material world must at once vanish because it is nothing but a phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of ourselves as a subject, and a manner or species of representation."

One response to some of the problems implicit in this is in the work of the philosopher Donald Davidson. In his paper 'The second person' he explores what it is to interpret the language or speech of another person. Here he names the process 'triangulation', in terms of a child's relation to a table:

"It is a form of triangulation: one line goes from the child in the direction of the table, one line goes from us in the direction of the table, and the third line goes between us and the child. Where the lines from the child to table and us to table converge, 'the' stimulus is located. Given our view of child and world, we can pick out 'the ' cause of the child's response. It is the common cause of our response and the child's response."

This is an account of the construction and development of meaning, the acquisition of understanding of intention, one's own and that of another person, and of a shared reality.

What is acquired here is done through language, through the learning and use of concepts and in time, through high level abstractions.

Quite simply someone like Trump reverses this process. Part no doubt of the appeal, his appeal, is that it is simple. It is simple because what he authorises is not-thinking. And his power in this is purely a function of the unfortunate fact that it is harder to think than to not-think.