Give me liberty or give me death

virtue is for the sake of liberty

Well perhaps it makes me a liberal on your terms, but I find it difficult to conceive how anyone could think the virtues have any other point than to make one a free person.

I would say that freedom is a product of virtue, but not the only one. For Enlightenment-cons, freedom tends to be an end in itself, without much regard for the uses to which it's put.

Scholars such as Patrick Deneen, Mark Mitchell, and others, many of them conservative Catholics, have argued that much of today's conservatism isn't actually conservative but is in fact right-liberalism, given its less-than-critical acceptance of Enlightenment tenets ("liberal" here having the original meaning, not the current political one). I haven't read deeply in this matter yet, but on the surface it makes a fair amount of sense.

I think that one difference between the classical/Christian and Enlightenment understandings of liberty is that the former emphasizes "freedom to" while the latter is based on "freedom from." The idea of virtue is primary in the former, but only secondary in the latter, if it's there at all.

Brad Gregory's excellent book The Unintended Reformation goes into this in considerable detail.

I think the distinction you make would be of significance primarily in the realm of drafting academic curricula (and, perhaps) public ceremonial. (Please recall Irving Kristol's remarks on the traffick in pornography: "If you care about the quality of American democracy, you have to be for censorship"; recall also that the most vociferous defender of the drug laws ca. 1987 was A.M. Rosenthal).

In an address in 2005, then Cardinal Ratzinger said the problems with the Enlightenment arose when it became disconnected from its roots, that is Christianity.

Some Enlightenment thinkers, like John Locke, didn't lose this connection. Which is perhaps why America's Founding Fathers, who were heavily influenced by Locke, put God in the Declaration of Independence.

I wouldn't attempt to answer that in a blog comment, Louise. Or probably even in a blog post. Let's see if I can sum it up...I think there have been a great many improvements in human life over the past 250 years or so, and I assume that at least some of those were set in motion by the Enlightenment. I really don't know enough history to back that up very well, though. The founding principles and Constitution of the U.S. are pretty good ideas, and the founders were men of the Enlightenment.

"Virtue can never be fully attained without liberty, and the absence of liberty proves that virtue in its full perfection is wanting. Therefore a man is free in proportion to the measure of his virtues, and the extent to which he is free determines what his virtues can accomplish; while on the other hand, it is the vices alone which bring about slavery, and subject a man to persons and things in unmeet obedience" (John of Salisbury)

Great essay from FPR with relevance to the virtue/liberty question and the Enlightenment. Per this piece it seems the question could also be framed "vision vs. method," or perhaps "telos vs. technos."

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2013/01/faith-wonder-and-the-method/

I only had time to read to the "implications" section, but it's really good. What really strikes me lately, and is reinforced by this piece, is just how *closed* the secular mind has become to any other possibility--almost, in a sense, ontologically closed, in that it can't be what it is and be open.

In the 1970s academics started using it as a translation of Aristotle's "eudaimonia" that most fully conveyed the range of that word's meaning. From there it came into more general works of Aristotelian philosophy, virtue ethics, and suchlike, like Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), and so on into ever broader circles of public discourse.

You're welcome.

It's only to be found in commentaries on Aristotle prior to the 1980s, and not outside academic philosophy for a long time after. I first came across it in the year 2000 (which is when I read After Virtue).

It struck me then as a clumsy bit of philosophical jargon, but it is hard to think what might replace it and do the same work. The older standard translation of eudaimonia was "happiness", but perhaps that's been spoiled by modern use as a feeling rather than a state or end. Could some variant of "thrive" and "thriving" do it?

In the past few years I've seen 'human flourishing' used as a sort of alternative to the term 'progress' by those who are wary or critical of the whole progressive mindset, technology, etc. Maybe this is where you're seeing it too, Mac.

I associate "human flourishing" with Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and Joseph Boyle. I think they believe that there are eight irreducible human goods that constitute human flourishing. You can't sacrifice one for the sake of the other.

Maybe it is seven. I remembered it as eight.

Maybe sleeping falls under practical reasonableness.