Spiritual enlightenment is the fundamental goal of most spiritual practices that you undertake. Enlightenment marks the culminating point of your practice you feel unity of soul with everything, all the mental and physical engagements are left aside. Spiritual enlightenment is the possession of highly evolved souls. Spiritual masters from all over over the world experience spiritual enlightenment, and help others on their own paths.

Spiritual enlightenment is often categorized into levels for practical purposes. The highest stage of spiritual enlightenment marks the attainment of unity with God or being one with everything. But can still there are certain levels through which the individual needs to evolve. In a similar way that man has evolved from more primitive animals, the human conciousiness or soul also evolves. For our practical purpose, put them in stages and analyze the state of being in each stage:

At the second stage of enlightenment, you feel apart of yourself in everything around you. You feel a connection with every object and individual in the world. The borders between yourself and the world around you dissipate. Your soul begins to merge with Supreme Soul. You feel that you are not individual anymore and not separate from anything. You feel that you are in everything and everything is just a part of the Supreme Soul from where you also have emerged. Many people describe this feelings of completeness and love.

The third stage of enlightenment, you no longer feel connected to everything but realize you are everything. You the experience the oneness of Creator Source and are not separate from anything in the universe. This stage of enlightenment is a direct experience of oneness.

Spiritual enlightenment is the fruit that sets you free, as you lose all wants and wishes to receive the fruits of your actions. You feel the bliss of completeness and true love. At first it gives you the feeling that you need Light. At the next stage, you feel that you are merging in Light. And in the final stage you and the Light are one.

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It is important to remember that when it comes to spiritual enlightenment, you cannot enlighten anyone else for this is a sole (and soul) journey. You can always help others along their path or even light the candle that piques their curiosity, but the only one you can truly enlighten is yourself. When it comes to enlightening others, all you can do is to plant the seed and hope the garden is watered with knowledge.

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The 3 Stages Of Spiritual Enlightenment - In5D Esoteric ...

Sweeping . . . Like being guided through a vast ballroom of rotating strangers by a confiding insider.The Washington PostFascinating.The Telegraph (London)A political tract for our time.The Wall Street Journal

For those who recognize the names Hegel, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Voltaire, and Diderot but are unfamiliar with their thought, [Anthony] Padgen provides a fantastic introduction, explaining the driving philosophies of the period and placing their proponents in context. . . . Padgens belief that the Enlightenment made it possible for us to think . . . beyond the narrow worlds into which we are born is clearly and cogently presented.Publishers Weekly (starred review)The Enlightenment really does still matter, and with a combination of gripping storytelling about colorful characters and lucid explanation of profound ideas, Anthony Pagden shows why.Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Blank SlateReading Anthony Pagdens The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters is an enlightenment in itself. The larger-than-life thinkers and talkers of eighteenth-century Europe have been blamed for everything from taking the magic out of life to making Auschwitz possible, but here, in sparkling style, Pagden shows us not only how their ideas made mankind modern but also what our world might have been like without them. Everyone interested in where the West came from should read this book.Ian Morris, author of Why the West RulesFor NowAnthony Pagden defends the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan project with classical roots and contemporary relevance. Like Kant, he argues that we live in an age of enlightenment, ongoing but incomplete, but that someday we will experience a fully enlightened age. His lucid and learned book might help to realize that hope.David Armitage, author of Foundations of Modern International ThoughtPagden demonstrates the breadth and depth of his knowledge and his impeccable research of the period we refer to as the Enlightenment. . . . A book that should be on every thinking persons shelfthe perfect primer for anyone interested in the development of Western civilization.Kirkus Reviews

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The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters - amazon.com

The Age of Enlightenment was an 18th century cultural movement in Europe. It was most popular in France, where its leaders included philosophers like Voltaire and Denis Diderot. Diderot helped spread the Enlightenment's ideas by writing the Encyclopdie, the first big encyclopedia that was available to everyone. The Enlightenment grew partly out of the earlier scientific revolution and the ideas of Ren Descartes.

The Enlightenment's most important idea was that all people can reason and think for themselves. Because of this, people should not automatically believe what an authority says. People do not even have to believe what churches teach or what priests say. This was a very new idea at the time.

Another important idea was that a society is best when everyone works together to create it. Even people with very little power or money should have the same rights as the rich and powerful to help create the society they live in.[1] The nobility should not have special rights or privileges any more.

These were very new ideas at the time. They were also dangerous thoughts for the people in power. Many Enlightenment philosophers were put in prison or were forced to leave their home countries.

Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States believed the Enlightenment's ideas. For example, the idea that a government's job is to benefit all of a country's people - not just the people in power - was very important to them. They made this idea about a government "for the people" one of the most important parts of the new United States Constitution and the new American government they created.

The Enlightenment's ideas were also important to the people who fought in the French Revolution of 1789.

In some countries, kings and queens took some of the Enlightenment's ideas and made changes to their governments. However, they still kept power for themselves. These kings and queens were called "enlightened despots." Examples include Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and Gustav III of Sweden.

During the Age of Enlightenment, as more and more people began to use reason, some began to disagree with the idea that God created the world. This caused conflicts - and, later, war.

Many ideas that are important today were created during the Enlightenment. Examples of these ideas include:

The Enlightenment's ideas about thinking with reason, having personal freedoms, and not having to follow the Catholic Church were important in creating capitalism and socialism.

Important people in the Enlightenment came from many different countries and shared ideas in many different ways. Some of the best-known Enlightenment figures, organized by home country, are:

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Age of Enlightenment - Simple English Wikipedia, the free ...

Causes

On the surface, the most apparent cause of the Enlightenmentwas the Thirty Years War. This horribly destructivewar, which lasted from 1618 to 1648,compelled German writers to pen harsh criticisms regarding the ideasof nationalism and warfare. These authors, such as HugoGrotius and John Comenius, were some of thefirst Enlightenment minds to go against tradition and propose bettersolutions.

At the same time, European thinkers interest in the tangible worlddeveloped into scientific study, while greater exploration of theworld exposed Europe to other cultures and philosophies. Finally,centuries of mistreatment at the hands of monarchies and the churchbrought average citizens in Europe to a breaking point, and themost intelligent and vocal finally decided to speak out.

The Enlightenment developed through a snowball effect:small advances triggered larger ones, and before Europe and theworld knew it, almost two centuries of philosophizing and innovationhad ensued. These studies generally began in the fields of earthscience and astronomy, as notables such as Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei tookthe old, beloved truths of Aristotle and disproved them. Thinkerssuch as Ren Descartes and Francis Bacon revisedthe scientific method, setting the stage for Isaac Newton andhis landmark discoveries in physics.

From these discoveries emerged a system for observingthe world and making testable hypotheses based on thoseobservations. At the same time, however, scientists faced ever-increasingscorn and skepticism from people in the religious community, whofelt threatened by science and its attempts to explain matters offaith. Nevertheless, the progressive, rebellious spirit of thesescientists would inspire a centurys worth of thinkers.

The first major Enlightenment figure in Englandwas Thomas Hobbes, who caused great controversywith the release of his provocative treatise Leviathan (1651).Taking a sociological perspective, Hobbes felt that by nature, peoplewere self-serving and preoccupied with the gathering of a limitednumber of resources. To keep balance, Hobbes continued, it was essentialto have a single intimidating ruler. A half century later, JohnLocke came into the picture, promoting the opposite typeof governmenta representative governmentin his Two Treatisesof Government (1690).

Although Hobbes would be more influential among his contemporaries,it was clear that Lockes message was closer to the English peopleshearts and minds. Just before the turn of the century, in 1688,English Protestants helped overthrow the Catholic king JamesII and installed the Protestant monarchs William andMary. In the aftermath of this Glorious Revolution,the English government ratified a new Bill of Rights that grantedmore personal freedoms.

Many of the major French Enlightenment thinkers, or philosophes, wereborn in the years after the Glorious Revolution, so Frances Enlightenmentcame a bit later, in the mid-1700s.The philosophes, though varying in style and area of particularconcern, generally emphasized the power of reason and sought todiscover the natural laws governing human society. The Baronde Montesquieu tackled politics by elaborating upon Locke'swork, solidifying concepts such as the separation of power bymeans of divisions in government. Voltaire took a morecaustic approach, choosing to incite social and political changeby means of satire and criticism. Although Voltaires satires arguablysparked little in the way of concrete change, Voltaire neverthelesswas adept at exposing injustices and appealed to a wide range ofreaders. His short novel Candide is regarded as oneof the seminal works in history.

Denis Diderot, unlike Montesquieu and Voltaire,had no revolutionary aspirations; he was interested merely in collectingas much knowledge as possible for his mammoth Encyclopdie.The Encyclopdie, which ultimately weighed in atthirty-five volumes, would go on to spread Enlightenment knowledgeto other countries around the world.

In reaction to the rather empirical philosophiesof Voltaire and others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote TheSocial Contract (1762),a work championing a form of government based on small, direct democracy thatdirectly reflects the will of the population. Later, at the endof his career, he would write Confessions, a deeplypersonal reflection on his life. The unprecedented intimate perspectivethat Rousseau provided contributed to a burgeoning Romantic erathat would be defined by an emphasis on emotion and instinct insteadof reason.

Another undercurrent that threatened the prevailing principlesof the Enlightenment was skepticism. Skeptics questionedwhether human society could really be perfected through the useof reason and denied the ability of rational thought to reveal universaltruths. Their philosophies revolved around the idea that the perceived worldis relative to the beholder and, as such, no one can be sure whetherany truths actually exist.

Immanuel Kant, working in Germany duringthe late eighteenth century, took skepticism to its greatest lengths,arguing that man could truly know neither observed objects nor metaphysicalconcepts; rather, the experience of such things depends upon thepsyche of the observer, thus rendering universal truths impossible. Thetheories of Kant, along with those of other skeptics such as DavidHume, were influential enough to change the nature of European thoughtand effectively end the Enlightenment.

Ultimately, the Enlightenment fell victim to competingideas from several sources. Romanticism was more appealing to less-educated commonfolk and pulled them away from the empirical, scientific ideas ofearlier Enlightenment philosophers. Similarly, the theories of skepticismcame into direct conflict with the reason-based assertions of theEnlightenment and gained a following of their own.

What ultimately and abruptly killed the Enlightenment,however, was the French Revolution. Begun with thebest intentions by French citizens inspired by Enlightenment thought,the revolution attempted to implement orderly representative assembliesbut quickly degraded into chaos and violence. Many people citedthe Enlightenment-induced breakdown of norms as the root cause of theinstability and saw the violence as proof that the masses could notbe trusted to govern themselves. Nonetheless, the discoveries andtheories of the Enlightenment philosophers continued to influenceWestern society for centuries.

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SparkNotes: The Enlightenment (16501800): Summary of Events

Definition:

The period known as the Enlightenment runs from somewhere around 1660, with the Restoration, or the crowning of the exiled Charles II, until the beginning of the 19th century and the reign of Victoria.

This chunk of time, which takes up some of the 17th century and all of the 18th century, is sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason because of its emphasis on a rational, secular worldview. Bringing light to the so-called dark corners of the mind, Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume wrote on subjects ranging from political philosophy to the nature of humankind. Many scholars argue that, given all this revolutionary thinking, the Enlightenment is the beginning of modern society.

The period saw lots of revolutionary activity, such as the French Revolution and the American Revolution. Interested in how Enlightenment thinking played a role in the American Revolution? Check out our learning guide on just that.

So what was happening in literature in during this era? Well, neoclassicism was all the rage in the early part of the period. Neoclassicism is a style of art that appropriates classical models from the ancients. Alexander Pope was the grandmaster of all that. This period also marked the rise of the novel, with novelists like Daniel Defoe churning out the fiction like nobody's business. His famous work Robinson Crusoeis an early example of the genre. There was also a fair amount of Enlightenment thinking going on in American letters, too, with folks like Benjamin Franklin espousing Enlightenment ideas in his The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Later literary periods were definitely influenced by the Enlightenment. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Romanticism, for example, was a reaction to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. And the Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, of course, wrote to pooh-pooh the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason.

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Literature Glossary - Enlightenment

The Enlightenment developed those features of the modern world that most libertarians prizeliberal politics and free markets, scientific progress, and technological innovation.

The Enlightenment took the intellectual revolutions of the early modern 17th century and transformed European and American society in the 18th century. At the beginning of the 17th century, Europe was largely feudal and prescientific. By the end of the 18th century, however, liberal democratic revolutions had swept away feudalism; the foundations of physics, chemistry, and biology had been laid; and the Industrial Revolution was at full steam.

The Enlightenment was the product of thousands of brilliant and hardworking individuals, yet two Englishmen are most often identified as inaugurating it: John Locke (16321704), for his work on reason, empiricism, and liberal politics; and Isaac Newton (16431727), for his work on physics and mathematics. The transition to the post-Enlightenment era is often dated from the successful resolution of the American Revolution in the 1780sor, alternatively, from the collapse of the French Revolution and the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte in the 1790s. Between Locke and Newton at the end of the 17th century and the American and French Revolutions at the end of the 18th century, there occurred 100 years of unprecedented intellectual activity, social ferment, and political and economic transformation.

Fundamental to the achievements of Locke and Newton was confident application of reason to the physical world, religion, human nature, and society. By the 1600s, modern thinkers began to insist that perception and reason are the sole means by which men could know the worldin contrast to the premodern, medieval reliance on tradition, faith, and revelation. These thinkers started their investigations systematically from an analysis of nature, rather than the supernatural, the characteristic starting point of premodern thought. Enlightenment intellectuals stressed mans autonomy and his capacity for forming his own characterin contrast to the premodern emphasis on dependence and original sin. Most important, modern thinkers began to emphasize the individual, arguing that the individuals mind is sovereign and that the individual is an end in himselfin contrast to the premodernist, feudal subordination of the individual to higher political, social, or religious authorities. The achievements of Locke and Newton represent the maturation of this new intellectual world.

Political and economic liberalism depend on confidence that individuals can run their own lives. Political power and economic freedom are thought to reside in individuals only to the extent that they are thought to be capable of using them wisely. This confidence in individuals rests on a confidence in human reasonthe means by which individuals can come to know their world, plan their lives, and socially interact.

If reason is a faculty of the individual, then individualism becomes crucial to our understanding of ethics. Lockes A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) and Two Treatises of Government (1690) are landmark texts in the modern history of individualism. Both link the human capacity for reason to ethical individualism and its social consequences: the prohibition of force against anothers independent judgment or action, individual rights, political equality, limiting the power of government, and religious toleration.

Science and technology more obviously depend on confidence in the power of reason. The scientific method is a refined application of reason to understanding nature. Trusting science cognitively is an act of confidence in reason, as is trusting ones life to its technological products. If one emphasizes that reason is the faculty of understanding nature, then the epistemology that emerges from it, when systematically applied, yields science. Enlightenment thinkers laid the foundations of all the major branches of science. In mathematics, Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed the calculus, Newton developing his version in 1666 and Leibniz publishing his in 1675.The monumental publication of modern physics, Newtons Principia Mathematica, appeared in 1687. A century of investigation led to the production of Carolus Linnaeuss Systema Naturae in 1735 and Species Plantarium in 1753, jointly presenting a comprehensive biological taxonomy. The publication of Antoine Lavoisiers Trait lmentaire de Chimie (Treatise on Chemical Elements) in 1789, proved to be the foundational text in the science of chemistry. The rise of rational science also brought broader social improvements, such as the lessening of superstition and, by the 1780s, the end of persecutions of witchcraft.

Individualism and science are consequences of an epistemology predicated on reason. Both applied systematically have enormous consequences. Individualism when applied to politics yielded a species of liberal democracy, whereby the principle of individual freedom was wedded to the principle of decentralizing political power. As the importance of individualism rose in the modern world, feudalism declined. Revolutions in England in the 1640s and in 1688 began this trend, and the modern political principles there enunciated spread to America and France in the 18th century, leading to liberal revolutions in 1776 and 1789. Political reformers instituted bills of rights, constitutional checks on abuses of government power, and the elimination of torture in judicial proceedings.

As the feudal regimes weakened and were overthrown, liberal individualist ideas were extended to all human beings. Racism and sexism are obvious affronts to individualism and went on the defensive as the 18th century progressed. During the Enlightenment, antislavery societies were formed in America in 1784, in England in 1787, and a year later in France; in 1791 and 1792, Olympe de Gougess Declaration of the Rights of Women and Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Women, landmarks in the movement for womens liberty and equality, were published.

Free markets and capitalism are a reflection of individualism in the marketplace. Capitalist economics is based on the principle that individuals should be left free to make their own decisions about production, consumption, and trade. As individualism rose in the 18th century, feudal and mercantilist institutions declined. With freer markets came a theoretical grasp of the productive impact of the division of labor and specialization and of the retarding impact of protectionism and other restrictive regulations. Capturing and extending those insights, Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is the landmark text in modern economics. With the establishment of freer markets came the elimination of guilds and many governmental monopolies, and the development of modern corporations, banking, and financial markets.

Science, when applied systematically to material production, yields engineering and technology. By the mid-18th century, the free exchange of ideas and wealth resulted in scientists and engineers uncovering knowledge and creating technologies on an unprecedented scale. The Industrial Revolution, underway for some decades, was substantially advanced by James Watts steam engine after 1769. Items that were once luxuriessuch as pottery, cotton fabric, paper for books and newspapers, and glass for windows in housessoon became mass-produced.

When science is applied to the human body, the result is advances in medicine. New studies of human anatomy and physiology swept away supernaturalistic and other premodern accounts of human disease. By the second half of the 18th century, medicine was placed on a scientific footing. Edward Jenners discovery of a smallpox vaccine in 1796, for example, provided protection against a major killer and established the science of immunization. Over the course of the century, physicians made advances in their understanding of nutrition, hygiene, and diagnostic techniques. These discoveries, combined with newly developed medical technologies, contributed to modern medicine. At the same time, advances in public hygiene led to a substantial decline in mortality rates, and average longevity increased.

The Enlightenment also was responsible for the establishment of the idea of progress. Ignorance, poverty, war, and slavery, it was discovered, were not inevitable. Indeed, Enlightenment thinkers came to be profoundly convinced that every human problem could be solved and that the human condition could be raised to new and as-yet unimagined heights. The time will come, wrote the Marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician and social reformer who also translated Smiths Wealth of Nations into French, when the sun will shine only on free men who have no master but their own reasons. Through science the world was open to being understood, to disease being eliminated, and to the unlimited improvement of agriculture and technologies. Every individual possessed the power of reason, and, hence, education could become universal and illiteracy and superstition eliminated. Because men possess reason, we are able to structure our social arrangements and design political and economic institutions that will protect our rights, settle our disputes peaceably, and enable us to form fruitful trading partnership with others. We can, they thought, become knowledgeable, free, healthy, peaceful, and wealthy without limit. In other words, the Enlightenment bequeathed to us the optimistic belief that progress and the pursuit of happiness are the natural birthrights of humankind.

Yet not all commentators regarded the Enlightenment as unrelievably progressive. Conservatives leveled three broad criticismsthat the Enlightenments rationalism undermined religious faith, that the Enlightenments individualism undermined communal ties, and that by overemphasizing the powers of reason and individual freedom the Enlightenment led to revolutions that instituted changes of such rapidity that they undermined social stability. Socialists also offered three criticismsthat the Enlightenments idolatry of science and technology led to an artificial world of dehumanizing machines and gadgets; that the Enlightenments competitive individualism and capitalism destroyed community and led to severe inequalities; and that the combination of science, technology, and capitalism inevitably led to technocratic oppression by the haves against the have-nots.

Contemporary debates over the significance of the Enlightenment thus have a threefold characterbetween those who see it as a threat to an essentially religious-traditionalist vision, those who see it as a threat to an essentially Left-egalitarian vision, and those who see it as the foundation of the magnificent achievements of the modern scientific and liberal-democratic world.

Further Readings

Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment. New York: Knopf, 1966. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1994 [1944].

Kramnick, Isaac, ed. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Kurtz, Paul, and Timothy J. Madigan, eds. Challenges to the Enlightenment. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994.

Rusher, William A., ed. The Ambiguous Legacy of the Enlightenment. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995.

William, David, ed. The Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Originally published August 15, 2008.

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Enlightenment | Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

At most bars, nonalcoholic options run to fruity mocktails and ginger ale. At Honeys in East Williamsburg, theres kvass, the ancient Russian beverage and purported health tonic fermented from rye bread. While this Slavic staple might seem an odd thing to stumble across in the wilds of artisanal Brooklyn, its not, when you consider that Honeys is actually the tasting room of Enlightenment Wines, the adjacent meadery that has made a mission of injecting local terroir into lost-in-time elixirs.

Kvass can be found elsewhere in New York, but not on tap like at Honeys, and nowhere near as lively and refreshing. The amber, fizzy liquid, made from chunks of toasted dark sourdough rye soaked in water, lacto-fermented, sweetened with a bit of honey and keg-conditioned, is nothing like the malty soda gathering dust on Brighton Beach supermarket shelves, or even the invigorating pickle-briny beet and kraut alt-kvasses that have ridden the probiotic marketing wave. Kvass has been a decade-long obsession of Enlightenment co-owner Raphael Lyon, but not just any kvass rather, the pre-industrial, home-brewed kind that people drank in the sixteenth century.

What makes our kvass special is that its alive, he says, referring to the lacto-fermentation that gives it its characteristic flavor pleasingly tart, with a satisfying roundness. You might compare it to that other K-drink, though Lyon wishes you wouldnt: Kombuchas filled with caffeine and sugar, he says, which is why people become addicted to it. His kvass has an ABV of under 1 percent, but if you want something stronger, you could order a Kvass Kollins, one of the drinks on an appealingly original list created by Lyons partner, Arley Marks, and bartender Torrey Bell-Edwards to showcase Enlightenments repertoire. The sweet-sour cocktail combines kvass with barrel-aged Brooklyn gin and the foamy chickpea cooking liquid called aquafaba, which Honeys sometimes sources from Dizengoff. Its served with a biodegradable straw thats actually a strand of uncooked bucatini, and it just might be the embodiment of Brooklyn mixology today.

93 Scott Ave., at Randolph St., East Williamsburg; 401-481-9205

*A version of this article appears in the September 4, 2017, issue ofNew York Magazine.

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An Old-world Tonic Gets a Fresh Spin at Brooklyn Bar Honey's - Grub Street

KAHOKA, MO. It was the first full day of the Clark County Fair, and over at the concession stand Emily Reyes was reading the novel Ulysses, raising her head every few paragraphs to look out through the window.

Same as ever, she thought. The old oaks along the midway. Ron from the Lions Club with the ice cream tent. Marvis selling tickets in the shade of the grandstand, where the demolition derby was the biggest draw. Emilys younger brother Cyrus was going to be in it Cyrus, who, along with her parents and most of Clark County had voted for Donald Trump, a reality Emily was now preparing herself to face.

She was 22 and home from a liberal-arts college near Kansas City, where she had majored in English and cross-cultural studies, spent a semester in Germany, worked a summer with refugees in Greece, and met and married a Guatemalan man who would be arriving tomorrow. She kept reminding people that she was Emily Reyes and no longer Emily Phillips Yes, Ray-ez, she kept saying. It means kings in Spanish, so Im royalty now.

Her father liked to say that his daughter had attained peak enlightenment, a sarcastic jab that Emily knew pointed to a larger truth. Her worldview had changed since she left Kahoka. She had voted against Trump. She had become increasingly worried about the country since the election. And at a moment when the phrase cold civil war was being used to describe the nations seemingly irreconcilable differences, coming home was beginning to feel like crossing over to the other side.

Emily looked around the concession stand she would be running with her family for the next three days: a long counter where she had put her iPhone speaker next to the paper cups; a shelf where she had put her bag of Starbucks coffee next to the tubs of ketchup; a fan blowing air that smelled like cows and sugar.

All the way home, she had thought about how she was supposed to act in this place she loved but now felt so conflicted about. How was she going to talk to people when every conversation seemed to slip into arguments about the fate of America? How was she going to get along for three days at a county fair?

She put down the novel about a young Irish man searching for meaning on an ordinary day in Dublin and began making some jalapeo poppers. A white-haired farmer in denim overalls arrived at the window.

Small cup of coffee, he said.

Its Starbucks! Emily began, realizing as soon as the words came out that Starbucks was of course a symbol of the urban elite liberal, which was exactly what she did not want to seem to be. She poured him a large cup of coffee and slid it across the counter.

***

She had always been known here as Keith and Connies daughter, the fourth of five children, an introvert who grew up absorbing the conservative values of a place where patriotism was the guy who parachuted out of her dads Cessna with an American flag on national holidays. Kahoka, population 2,007, was a town in the rural northeastern corner of Missouri where almost every person was white, most were Republican and many were Trumps, an old Kahoka family name that has no relation to the president.

The Clark County Fair had been the main cultural ritual for 136 years. Every summer, it was the 4-H kids and the cows, the trailer-size rides, the open art show paintings of backyard flowers, the campers huddled around the crabgrass edges of the fairgrounds. At election time, the fair was also a venue for politics. Last year, a huge Trump banner hung inside the commercial building where the Clark County Republican sign usually was, and here and there, Make America Great Again hats replaced the usual John Deeres. Nearly 3 of every 4 voters in the county went for Trump. The fair was the living, breathing example of his rural Midwestern audience.

Emily had been going since she was a girl, and had always looked forward to the feeling of ease, the lull while the corn was rising, the unhurried conversations. But nothing felt easy to her since the election, especially conversations of the sort that she had learned could arise here.

She had tried talking to her parents during other visits home, telling them that a vote for Trump was a vote to deport your future son-in-law. She had tried with Cyrus, and their relationship had only suffered. She and her best friend Hannah had decided not to talk about Trump at all because of the strain the subject had put on their friendship. A sister-in-law had told Emily that she had become difficult to talk to lately, self-righteous and angry.

Now she had to figure out another way. She turned on some Bob Dylan at a low volume, opened Ulysses and settled into a folding chair, advancing 10 pages before Hannah arrived to help. Hannah Trump was her maiden name. Her uncle ran Trump Trucks. An aunt ran a bed-and-breakfast called Trump Haus. Her brother played football and was booed at an out-of-state game recently because of the name Trump on his jersey. Emily silently reminded herself not to mention Trump.

They began making biscuits and gravy, talking about an old high school classmate studying at the University of Missouri.

She was asking me to help her work on a project about diversity in small towns she wants to know about any racial targeting, Emily began.

You may not see my opinion Emily, but around here a college degree is not as needed, Hannah said.

Emily tried bringing up an English teacher they both had.

Remember we took that class from him, contemporary issues? And we had to pick an issue and talk about it? It was so good for us kids, Emily said.

Yeah, he said he was conservative but he was more liberal, Hannah said.

He made me love literature, Emily said.

Hannah slid some biscuits into the oven.

Two minutes, she said.

They talked about other classmates, one who was a lawyer in Arizona, another who was a hair stylist in Los Angeles, and then Hannah considered Emily.

Youre different, but probably not so different as you think, she said.

What do you mean? Emily said.

Youve always been different than everybody else. A lot of people who grew up here want to get out, but youre different in that you like coming home, said Hannah.

Emily decided not to spoil the moment by explaining how complicated home was to her now, how difficult it was to understand how Hannah could vote for a person who had demonized the Syrian refugees and immigrants that Emily now considered her friends, or how a liberal arts education really was worthwhile because it had taught her how complicated the world could be, or how all of this related to her growing concern about the country. She let the conversation wane.

We need some music, Emily said. What do you want to listen to Hannah?

Anything, Hannah said, so Emily turned on some country music, and when Hannah left to take care of her dog, she went back to Ulysses.

She was on page 246 when her husband Cristian arrived, a relief because he understood everything about this situation. He was 22 and a natural diplomat, an immigrant from Guatemala who grew up from the age of 8 in a mostly white corner of southwestern Missouri where Trump had gotten 72 percent of the vote. He wore a T-shirt with a huge American flag, and assured Emily he was in full PR mode.

He was chopping potatoes when Emilys brother Cyrus arrived to help with lunch and began talking about a friend of his who was in the military. The friend had told Cyrus he agreed with Trumps attempt to ban transgender people from the service. Cyrus was saying he agreed with Trump too.

It just costs too much, he said, dropping potatoes into hot oil.

Its not true, began Emily, feeling her anger rising, then deciding to stifle it. I mean, some people think that. But.

She retreated to the sink to wash dishes.

Im not allowed to serve in the military, Cristian said.

Why? said Cyrus.

Im not a citizen, Cristian said.

Cant you go to training camp? Cyrus pressed.

Emily sensed the conversation veering toward an argument and tried for a distraction.

The fries! she said.

Oh! Cyrus said, dumping the charred potatoes into a paper boat.

They look good, Cristian said.

Try one, Cyrus said, and Cristian did, and they moved on to talking about a sick cow Cyrus had to take care of, and the car he was driving in the demolition derby.

Hey Em, are you going to watch me in the demo? Cyrus said.

Id love to if I can get away, Emily said, calming down, and after Cyrus left, Cristian said to Emily, Its like how do you say anything without offending him? and Emily said, Yeah.

Maybe the best path forward was avoidance, Emily thought. Avoid Trump, avoid all related controversial subjects. Talk about biscuits and fries and the demolition derby and appreciate what Kahoka was, not what it wasnt.

She ate a tenderloin. She ate a fried peach pie. She and Cristian shared some Lions Club ice cream, which was mysteriously good, and after a while, she began to feel more relaxed.

They decided to drive to the grocery store for supplies, pulling out of the fairgrounds and under the wrought-iron arch that said Clark County Fair, 1883.

They turned onto a two-lane road and got stuck behind the only traffic, a man on a riding lawn mower. Emily looked out the window as they inched along. A cornfield. A decaying brick bowling alley. Trump Haus.

I forget, she said, referring to the slow pace of home.

Back at the stand, they unloaded the potatoes and buns and were talking about how fried tenderloin is sort of like the Spanish dish chicharron, when Emilys father arrived, red-faced and sweating from the farm, and began talking about how the expected rain hadnt fallen.

We were supposed to get three inches, Keith Phillips said, working on the french-fry slicer. We got about a quarter inch.

Soon, Hannah arrived and she and Keith began comparing rainfall totals, talking about the scourge of Japanese beetles this year and whether global warming was a factor, which Keith thought was overblown, like so many things, including all the anxiety over Trump, and for that matter all the talk about divisions in America.

Emily listened, spraying ant killer on the line crawling across the counter.

Its a self-fulfilling prophecy, Keith went on. Everybody agrees to be divided. Where if you just let the walls down, talk and just be open, you soon realize you have a whole lot more in common.

Emily wiped the counter, listening to her dad rather than engaging him, or arguing about global warming, or explaining how hard it was to understand why her father the person she considered one of the most generous people I know could vote for a man like Trump, whose character seemed his opposite.

She stayed quiet and took orders at the window. And when there was a nice long lull later in the evening, instead of bringing up any of those things, she started talking about soda.

Were a Pepsi family, Emily said.

Ive been seeing a lot of those glass bottles of Coke made in Mexico using real sugar, said Cristian.

When we were in Nicaragua, Keith said, referring to a mission trip he took there once, they had these coolers full of grape pop and it was so good.

***

And that was how conversations were going, not only at the concession stand but all over the Clark County Fair.

At a moment when Trump was making news almost every day, when the Trump campaign was under investigation for possible ties to Russia, when some Americans were still rooting for his agenda and others were convinced that his presidency amounted to a national crisis of historic dimensions no one seemed to be talking about Trump at all.

In the very heart of Trump country, no Make America Great Again hats were in sight. No Trump T-shirts. No Trump bumper stickers or placards.

When asked, people said the standard things Trump voters have been saying, that the president should stop tweeting so much, or Congress should give him a chance, or that he was always the lesser of two evils. Then they went back to talking about how good the corn was looking, or the car crash yesterday, or which garden photo won the open art show.

Sitting in the shade of the grandstand, Marvis Trump, a member of the fair board and owner of Trump Haus, had her theory. She had supported Trump, she said, and for a while, she even had a Trump sign up at her house because it irritated her liberal daughter-in-law. It was a lot of fun, she said, but sometime around Easter, she said, that feeling faded.

Probably the funs over now, she said.

The smoke from the election, its gone out of here, said Karl Hamner, another fair board member, idling in his golf cart for a moment before zipping down the midway.

And that was one way of understanding the 136th annual Clark County Fair, as a return to normal at a moment when nothing in America was normal. That was how Emily wanted to feel. She wanted the kind of ease she had with her family and friends before all of this, before college, before Germany, before meeting Syrian refugees in Greece, before everything became more complicated and almost everyone she knew and loved voted for Trump.

Hear from rural voters in Ashtabula County, Ohio, as they describe the most important issues to them. (McKenna Ewen,Whitney Leaming,Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)

You guys been down to the cattle show? she said to a man in jeans and boots.

Hot out there? she said to a man in a John Deere hat.

In the evening, Emilys dad arrived to help with the dinner rush, and when she asked him a question about the tenderloin batter, he said, Should someone reading Ulysses be asking that question? and Emily let it go.

When Hannah arrived and joked that the only reason Emily was reading Ulysses was because she wanted to say she had read Ulysses, Emily kept her mouth shut.

She put Ulysses on the shelf by the ketchup tubs. She ate a homemade doughnut. She stirred barbecue sauce into the pulled pork.

Soon, her mother arrived to help, and with all of them there chopping potatoes and frying pork, Keith said, We got the Phillipses here and we got the Trumps! What more do you need?

Emily thought maybe father was right. Maybe this was all that was needed after one of the most divisive elections in U.S. history the Phillipses, the Trumps, fried meat and the Clark County Fair, the same as ever.

Then Cristian arrived with the new Reyes wing of the family. His mother Ana and his older brother Oscar had driven two hours from their home in Iowa to visit, and now Emily rushed outside and hugged them.

Because Ana and Oscar spoke little English, and Emily spoke little Spanish, they mostly smiled and nodded in silence, and when the dinner rush was over, Emilys parents came outside to say hello.

Ana gave Emilys mother a gift shed brought for her, a glass serving dish.

Emilys mother gave Ana the cake shed made for her.

Oh thank you! Its beautiful, said Connie.

Oh, thank you, said Ana.

Thank you for coming, said Keith, and seeing all this, Emily felt relieved.

This was what she wanted, too, for Cristians family to feel welcome, especially here and especially now. And that was how the second day of the Clark County fair ended. In the heart of Trump country, it wasnt the Phillipses and the Trumps but the Phillipses and the Reyeses lingering a while in the grass.

***

On the third day of the fair, Cristian had to drive back to Kansas City, and said goodbye to Emilys mother at the concession stand.

Thanks for everything, he said.

No, thank you, Connie said, hugging him as Emily looked on.

It was the last big night of the fair, demolition derby night, and soon the midway was busy and people were lining up at the concession stand, where Emilys dad was working the fryer, and Emily and her mom were taking orders at the window.

Mom, can we cut the tenderloin in half? said Emily, who had decided by now that the best way to get along was to stick to fair talk and see what happened.

Yes we can, said Connie, who sometimes wished she understood her daughter better.

The truth was she was amazed by how much Emily seemed to know, and was also self-conscious when conversations turned to politics or global issues, because she had never finished college herself.

As Connie put it, Sometimes Im like, Oh, I didnt know that I didnt know that. And sometimes the impasse made her feel sad because as a mom, you want your kids to think youre cool, and then she moves four hours away and things change. But.

In the calm before the rush, Emily turned on some Louis Armstrong, and as Connie made a pulled pork sandwich she said to her daughter, You know that song Losing Cinderella?

I dont listen to country that much, Emily said.

Come on, you know it I heard it at church, and it made me cry, Connie said.

I dont know it, Emily said, turning back to the window.

The rest is here:
T H E H O M E C O M I N G - The Washington Post - Washington Post

by Jesse Norman

The date of July 4, 1776, has other claims to fame, of course. But while Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and their fellow revolutionaries were meeting in Philadelphia to publish the Declaration of Independence and launch a new nation, across the Atlantic a private gathering of even greater intellectual distinction was in progress.

David Hume was dying. Slipping away fast; so fast indeed that in February he told his great friend Adam Smith that he had "fallen five compleat stones". Hume had installed himself some years before in the New Town in Edinburgh, in a house big enough "to display my great Talent for Cookery, the Science to which I intend to addict the remaining Years of my Life". Now, knowing he was near his end, he had gathered Smith and a few other friends around him for one last dinner in company.

But although Hume's famous fleshy frame had gone, his sense of humour no less renowned had not. When Smith complained that evening at the cruelty of the world in taking him from them, Hume replied: "No, no. Here am I, who have written on all sorts of subjects calculated to excite hostility, moral, political, and religious, and yet I have no enemies; except, indeed, all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians."

With Thomas Hobbes, Hume has good claim to be considered the greatest philosopher ever to have written in English, while Smith is widely regarded as "the father of economics". But even these descriptions underplay the measure of their achievements, for Hume must also be counted one of the greatest of historians, and Smith with equal justice the father of sociology. John F Kennedy once remarked to a dinner of Nobel Prize winners that theirs was the most extraordinary collection of talent seen at the White House since Jefferson dined alone. But in intellectual terms even Jefferson is pretty thin gruel compared to the cornucopic abundance of Smith and Hume.

In many ways they were the original odd couple. Hume, the older man by 12 years, was worldly, open, witty, full of small talk, banter and piercing aperus, a lover of whist, a gourmand and a flirt. Smith by contrast was reserved, private, considered and often rather austere in his public manner, though he could unwind among friends. Despite, or perhaps because of, these personal differences the two men became firm friends, and their ideas the central intellectual engine of the Scottish Enlightenment.

In The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought, Dennis Rasmussen, an academic at Tufts University, tells the story of their friendship well. Fourteen nicely-judged chapters take the reader through the overlapping lives of the two men, including such incidents as Hume's notorious falling-out with Rousseau, through to the natural climax of their friendship at Hume's death, and Smith's own demise 14 years later.

At the same time, Rasmussen dexterously weaves in an account of the two men's ideas that is, on the whole, accurate, meticulous and wide ranging. The result is not a work of original scholarship for that, one should look to James Harris' recent life of Hume, or to Ian Simpson Ross' life of Smith 20-odd years ago but a short and lively book that sustains the interest not merely of the general reader but the specialist to the end. That is a considerable achievement.

As the title suggests, within the narrow confines of 18th-century Scotland, Hume and Smith lived rather different lives. Hume was a philosophical prodigy. His first book, A Treatise of Human Nature a masterpiece was written when he was in his mid-twenties, and published in three volumes in 1738-40. In a last autobiographical memoir, Hume remarked sardonically that the work "fell dead-born from the press". In fact, however, it was respectably received, especially given the youth and obscurity of its author, the astonishing intellectual ambition of its ideas, and their rich potential to give religious offence.

But the Treatise certainly did not discharge Hume's hopes for it, or for himself, and such was his self-confessed "yearning for literary fame" that over the next 30 years he recast and extended many of its leading ideas in other works of philosophy, built a considerable reputation as an essayist on political, economic and moral topics, attracted a vast amount of religious scandal, was lionised in the literary salons of France, and made a fortune with his bestselling History of England in six volumes. And as he did so, first Edinburgh and then Glasgow universities achieved the notable distinction of turning down one of the greatest thinkers of this or any age for an academic job.

Smith's life, by contrast, was the very pattern of academic uneventfulness. He went first to the University of Glasgow, then to Balliol College, Oxford which he much disliked for its indolence and Scotophobia then after a short interval back to Glasgow as professor. Later he toured France as tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, before finally taking a position as Commissioner of Customs. Over 40 years he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and very little else.

Not that Smith was idle; far from it. He endlessly revised these books, and in his later years confessed to having "two other great works upon the anvil; the one is a sort of philosophical history of all the different branches of literature, of philosophy, poetry and eloquence; the other is a sort of theory and history of law and government". But neither work satisfied him, neither was completed as old age and the grind of the customs business bore in on him, and near his death he instructed his executors to burn them, and perhaps other works unknown, which they did. Miraculously, two fairly full sets of students' notes of Smith's lectures on jurisprudence have survived. But Smith was almost as close-handed in the volume of his published output as Hume was lavish.

The same is true of their private letters. For all their closeness as Rasmussen notes, they moved over the years from "Dear Sir" to "Dear Smith" and "My Dear Hume" to "My Dearest Friend" at the end, an epithet uniquely reserved for each other the two men never lived in the same city, and actually saw rather little of each other. In other circumstances one might expect that fact to be a spur to correspondence. Yet we have just 56 letters between them almost three-quarters of them by Hume and not much sign of many others lost.

It is a small and sometimes splendid correspondence, which ranges from gossip, political news and personal recommendations to brief moments of high philosophy. Among its gems is a wildly funny romp after the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Hume in London alternately deflects and teases Smith in Glasgow as to how his book has been received. But 56 letters in 25-odd years of acquaintance is a meagre basis from which to write any biography of a friendship, let alone an intellectual one. Especially since, with a couple of modest exceptions, there is no place at which Hume and Smith engage in anything that might with any real justice be described as an argument.

So instead one must turn to the two men's works themselves. Yet here too there is a problem, of a rather different kind. This is that, with the exception of his History of England, Hume had all but stopped writing and publishing by the time he first met Smith. Far more than any other thinker, Hume is Smith's imagined interlocutor; there are few pages of Smith in which one does not sense the shadow, if not the influence, of Hume; indeed, it would not be too much to call Smith, for all their numerous points of difference, a disciple of Hume. Thus the flow is heavily in one direction.

Take the two problems together, and it is hard to escape this conclusion: we cannot tell from the letters how far the friendship by itself shaped Smith's thought; and, at least as regards their published works, we can be pretty certain that Smith did not shape the thought of Hume.

Rasmussen's book is not well served by its subtitle, then, catchy though it is; and the problem is all the more evident because one looks in vain for any substantial discussion of the ways in which modern thought has in fact been shaped by Hume and Smith. There is something that could, with some shortcuts and elisions, be called "Hume-and-Smith", and that combined body of thought has had a profound influence on the way we think and act today. But this book barely addresses that influence, even in outline.

Let us briefly remind ourselves why this matters. At the heart of the two men's thought is a perhaps the great Enlightenment project. This is to set out what Hume describes in the introduction of his Treatise as a "science of man": a unified and general account la Newton of human life in all its major aspects, derived from a few basic propositions, covering not merely mathematics and what would now be termed the hard sciences, but philosophy, religion, political economy, jurisprudence and the arts, and able in principle to serve as the basis for every other branch of human knowledge. Crucially, this science of man was to be based on observation and experience not on natural law, divine inspiration or religious dogma.

In Hume's coolly sceptical hands the test of observation and experience led to a series of devastating critiques and empirical reconstructions, notably of the ideas of a transcendental human self or soul, of unobservable laws of causation and of divine justice. Smith is less purely philosophical, more positive and constructive, and more focused on the unintended results of human action: The Theory of Moral Sentiments argues that moral values are derived from human empathy working through interpersonal comparisons, The Wealth of Nations that markets, indeed commercial society, derive from the human instinct to truck and barter.

There are areas peculiar to each man, and real disagreements between them, notably over justice, in relation to which Hume emphasises utility and Smith injury. But their overall approach is the same: to deflate the claims of religion, if only by implication, and substitute for them general explanations based on recognisable human practices, emotions and habits. The result, a century before Darwin, is an evolutionary understanding of a vast range of moral, sociological, political and economic phenomena that is both recognisably modern and astonishingly powerful, marking every field it touches. Its full measure has yet to be taken.

Such ideas appeared to leave religion by the wayside, and it is not hard to see how they would excite the ire of the authorities. In fact Hume may have been more agnostic than atheist, but it made no difference at the time, and he was regularly denounced. The ever-circumspect Smith seemed to have escaped this fate, however, until "A single, and, as I thought, a very harmless sheet of paper, which I happened to write concerning the death of our late friend, Mr Hume, brought upon me 10 times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain."

As Rasmussen shows, Hume had the last laugh on his opponents. He died a philosopher's death, cheerful and unperturbed to the last, and no one much begrudged him it, or the posthumous publication of his brilliantly subversive Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But Smith's encomium of Hume, superbly written and full of pathos and paganism and Socratic overtones, brought the roof down on him. It was an act of love as well as of truth, perfectly befitting their friendship.

Prospect

The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought, by Dennis Rasmussen is published by Princeton University Press. Jesse Norman is a British Conservative MP and the author of a biography of Edmund Burke (2013). He is writing a book about Adam Smith, to be published next year.

Prospect, distributed by the New York Times Syndicate

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David Hume and Adam Smith, two men who refined the idea of the Enlightenment - The Australian Financial Review

Installation view of the loosely reconstructed Philosophy Chamber, with large portraits by John Singleton Copley and bird specimens prepared by Charles Willson Peale. The red wallpaper is inspired by a fragment of the original wallpaper donated to the chamber by John Hancock, c. 1772. On view in the The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvards Teaching Cabinet, 17661820 at the Harvard Art Museums (photo by Katya Kallsen, President and Fellows of Harvard College)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. A vast and encompassing view of the world contained in a room so small that it wasreferred to as a chamber such was the hope and hubris of the 18th-century Enlightenment figures in America.

The tiny room was called the Philosophy Chamber, and it attracted some of the most inventive minds in the United States, when our country was in its formative years, feeling out its independence and still searching for its own narrative. George Washington visited, Benjamin Franklin helped secure its contents, John Hancock donated the flocked wallpaper, and John Singleton Copley painted august portraits for its walls. At once a laboratory, art gallery, and lecture hall, its main purpose was to serve the students of Harvard College.

This wee chamber thrived from 1766 to 1820 and then all but disappeared, until recent years. Ethan Lasser, a curator at the Harvard Art Museums, kept encountering references to a teaching cabinet at the school while researching something else entirely, the whereabouts of a lost portrait.

What he discovered instead was evidence of a lost museum, a place that was the heart of intellectual life in New England for more than half a century.

Now, for the first time since the Philosophy Chamber was disbanded and its formal portraits, scientific instruments, natural specimens, and indigenous objects scattered to Harvards collections and other Boston-area institutions, the room has been effectively recreated. An exhibition reunites many of its original objects and replicates some of its attributes, such as the deep magenta wallpaper.

The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvards Teaching Cabinet 17661820, now on view at the Harvard Art Museums, recovers a unique chapter in American intellectual history. It also confronts us with questions resonant to our time about the very nature of knowledge: How is knowledge produced and shared? How is it wielded to liberate or oppress? How much of the world, in all of its richness, can we truly apprehend?

The Philosophy Chamber was set up to reconcile the moral, political, and religious underpinnings of Harvards curriculum with the still nascent sciences in a holistic way. It existed at a time when books and objects were on par with each other pedagogically, and when art and science were seen as inherent to one another.

Harvard students back then would have looked to ancient Western civilizations, memorizing and reciting Greek and Roman texts, while also utilizing art and scientific instruments for their studies in the chamber. In the years before specialization divided academia into disciplines, all students at Harvard were novice philosophers and scientists. The world was freshly open in other ways, too. The first American ship to circumnavigate the globe, the Columbia, returned to Boston during this time with treasures and tales that found their way into the teaching cabinet.

The ideas that surfaced in this rich and tactile atmosphere, from a 21st-century vantage point, at least, were audacious and at times deeply problematic.

Consider, for instance, the six ink and pencil drawings of skulls by Harvard professor and naturalist William Dandridge Peck. Five of them show human skulls and one an apes, each with a label such as Georgian, Negro (Guinea), or Groenlander. The early-19th-century drawings themselves and Pecks lecture notes refer to the facial angles of the skulls, terminology used, in addition to skin color, to create a disturbing hierarchy of races. The compositions are troubling. The African and ape skulls are likened visually, the only two shown in full profile, while the other four are drawn in three-quarter pose. In other words, the African man was shown as less than human or closer to nature. Peck presumably presented arguments about a hierarchy of races to his students using these drawings.

That this kind of blatant racist agenda existed at Harvard at the time is not surprising, though its worth asking why it took more than two centuries for the drawings to be exhumed and presented in this context. Debates about the morality of slavery persisted on campus, despite significant support for abolition in Massachusetts. Slavery became illegal in the state in 1783, but some of Harvards benefactors were products of slave-based economies in the South and abroad.

And what of the four small paintings by Italian-born artist Agostino Brunias? What could be amiss in his idyllic and erotic island scenes of women conversing and bathing amid palm trees, pink clouds, and overflowing baskets of fruit? Well, Brunias was idealizing slave societies, the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Some of his primary patrons were British and American plantation owners, which makes the white male peeping Tom, who ogles the women from behind a tree in one of the paintings, even more disturbing. Small labels pasted to the backs of Bruniass paintings describing the women as French Mulatresses or Mulatress and Negro Woman are stark evidence of what scholars now call the scientific racism of the era.

The Philosophy Chambers collection was hardly the product of careful, systematic acquisition, as would be typical in museums and libraries today. Instead, an urgent call went out after a fire burned Harvards original library to the ground in 1764, destroying the vast majority of its holdings. Wealthy alumni, amateur naturalists, entrepreneurial merchants, and others dispatched books, instruments, and objects to Cambridge from across the globe. Collectively, these gifts represented a network of mostly white men who acquired or traded for such items based on their fascination with, and often exploitation of, people unlike themselves.

Of the 1,000 or so original objects in the chamber, about 200 have been located by Lasser, head of the division of European and American art at the Harvard Art Museums, and his team. Some 70 of those are part of the exhibition, while items collected in a similar fashion have been chosen as stand-ins for others that were lost or too fragile for display.

In a profound act of cultural erasure, many of these objects were stripped of the particulars of their making and history once they entered the global trade of rare curiosities, as the exhibit calls it. Basic information about the creators, materials, and cultures was disregarded in favor of the tales of adventure that brought them to America. In the current exhibit, some of the indigenous objects are intentionally presented without fully correcting the record, with only scant information, as would have been the case in the chamber. This seems strange, even problematic, at first. Yet its meaningful to experience these items at they would have been viewed in the cabinet, without the kind of context weve come to expect. We are left to wonder about the impossibly petite Qing dynasty shoes made of silk and wood for Cantonese ladies bound feet; a native Hawaiian crested helmet fashioned from bright orange feathers; a stone Cherokee pipe bowl; and a native Tubuaian headdress made of wood, coconut fiber, parrot feathers, shells, and human hair.

Unknown artist, Cherokee, Pipe Bowl (19th century), stone, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University, Gift of the Heirs of David Kimball, 99-12-10/53119 (photo courtesy Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, PM# 99-12-10/53119 [digital file 60740101]; President and Fellows of Harvard College)Indeed, one of the great contributions of this exhibition is the reproachful realities it brings to light, the academic roots of racism. The curators do not shy away from what theyve uncovered in the primary didactics for the show or its scholarly catalogue. The exhibit may, in fact, feed the reckoning now occurring at Harvard over its legacy of discrimination and racism, as well as the larger reckoning playing out across the country.

At Harvard, where I was a fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism during the last academic year, this reckoning has involved a call from Harvard President Drew Faust, a historian of the Civil War and the first woman to lead the university, to confront the schools rarely acknowledged links to slavery. It involved the unveiling of a plaque that honors slaves who worked on campus for Harvard presidents and the exhibit Bound by History: Harvard, Slavery, and Archives, which earlier this year presented ongoing research about links between slavery and universities around the world. Students have also demanded greater transparency and discourse around issues of race and social justice in recent years, especially with the rise of Black Lives Matter. That this reckoning feels fresh and urgent on campus is telling. That the Philosophy Chamber exhibition, with its unromantic approach, contributes new discoveries only emphasizes how much work has yet to be done.

Though the worst tendencies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries are on full display in the current show, so are some of the finest. A revelation for me was seeing how essential art and science once were to one another, given how distinct those worlds can be today. Simply put, art was at the heart of learning.

Before widespread mechanization, scientific instruments demanded the exquisite craftsmanship of artisans, sometimes several hands with multiple specializations. One remarkable machine with a mahogany wheel, brass parts, and glass orb was used for creating static electricity. Slides painted in jewel-like colors were paired with a magic lantern, a proto film projector, to project astronomical phenomena onto the chambers wall. Simple, graphic representations of the sun and moon swirl the Earth kinetically in a large, circular projection one moment, while an eclipse unfolds cinematically the next. No special glasses needed.

Perhaps the grandest scientific instrument in the show is a large, round orrery made especially for the Philosophy Chamber by Boston clockmaker Joseph Pope. Its a mechanical, clockwork model of the solar system, exceptionally cutting edge for its time. Pope spent a dozen years constructing the piece of brass, bronze, mahogany, painted glass, and ivory, largely during the Revolutionary War. Paul Revere may have lent a hand, though scholars cant be sure. A crank was used to turn the miniature planets in their orbits around the sun and, likewise, their moons around them. Flanking the orrery are the likenesses of Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, and other notable thinkers. This complex 18th-century contraption has made me want to gaze at the night sky every bit as much as the images of the moons dance with the sun that spilled from my social feeds during the recent eclipse, maybe more. It leaves me to wonder: How do we learn best? What really opens us up to new knowledge?

At some point, the world of what is known became too expansive for the tiny Philosophy Chamber. Books edged out objects and became the dominant form of archiving and sharing information in academic settings; the notion that a multitude of disciplines could be contained and studied in depth by all college students became largely a thing of the past. And so, the Philosophy Chambers collection of wondrous things was carved up and scattered. Still, all of these generations later, it has much to teach us.

The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvards Teaching Cabinet, 17661820 continues at the Harvard Art Museums (32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA) through December 31.

Read the rest here:
Recovering the Philosophy Chamber, Harvard's Enlightenment-Era Teaching Cabinet - Hyperallergic