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The French Revolution and Freedom
| Article
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15991 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
787 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
We have devoted a considerable portion of this month's issue to the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. Americans, who are aware that France has been our ally since the time of our own revolution, empathize with the French celebration. The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, shares with the flag and the bald eagle the distinction of symbolizing our own nation and civilization.
The great motto of the French Revolution--Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity--expresses values we Americans respect greatly. Yet, it would be dishonest if we did not note the distortions these values suffered during the Revolution. In one of his rare poetic moments, Hegel referred to the concept of absolute freedom, as it came to be expressed in the French Revolution, as "absolute death, meaningless death, as meaningless as quaffing a glass of water or clefting a head of cabbage."
French intellectual life at the time of the Revolution was dominated by the philosophers. Some, like Holbach, were empiricists, who believed that knowledge started with sensation. These sensations produced a picture of an external world that was in principle completely knowable. Others, like Condorcet, following the model of inquiry initiated by Descartes, were rationalists. Conceiving of the world on the basis of mathetmatical logic, they believed it was governed by fundamental axioms the mind could grasp intuitively.
If God--who had made the world but then left it to its own devices--knew the initial conditions of the atoms, he would be able to predict the entire future. Men were machines in a clocklike world that science, in principle, could understand thoroughly.
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