Mas Ari, saya berpendapat, terutama dari penelaahan socio-historie,
pencerahan yang menaikkan derajat wanita, adalah terutama pembuahan
dari masa enlightment (Jerman: Aufkl�rung). Dibawah ini saya gelar
sebuah tulisan mengenai European enlightment diabad XVII.
Juga, menurut saya, karena terjadi europaization dar ajaran
Kristiani, sebagai dampak berpindahnya para rasul dan bapak gereja,
dari Timur Tengah ke Eropa, melalui Yunani dan Italia. Disinilah
masuk dasar dasar falsafah Eropa dari Sokrates dkk. (ajaran
Augustinus, Thomas dari Aquin dll).
Kedudukan wanita di masayrakat Eropa memang sangat berbeda daripada
di tempat2 lain didunia. Jadi budaya Eropalah yang mendorong
kesemuanya ini, bukan murni budaya Kristiani.
Mengapa? Karena tempat wanita dalam masyarakat, juga dalam ajaran
Kristiani, tak banyak beda dengan dalam ajaran Yahudi, yang adalah
subordinated. Kita baca ini terutama dalam Perjanjian Lama. Wanita
juga digambarkan sebagai sebagian dari rusuk pria, ini berarti,
wanita adalah bagian dari pria. Atau wanita adalah tubuh, pria adalah
kepala.Dst.
Jangan lupa, ini memang budaya suku Semit. Kedudukan wanita dimasa
nabi Musa, dan di tanah Arab setelah Islam muncul, tak banyak
berbeda. Juga dalam masyarakat Yahudi orthodox, sekarang juga di
Eropa dan Amerika, kdudukan wanita exactly sama dengan dalam
masyarakat Arab. Sama.
Ini juga kita temui dalam masyarakat Hindu India. Atau dalam
masyarakat Tao dikalangan masyarakat Tiongkok.
Jadi karena itulah ada peningkatan derajat wanita dalam masyarakat
Kristiani modern WALAU ada kisah dosa Eva atau Hawa. Budaya
occidental (Eropa) dengan falsafah Yunaninya yang membawa ini semua.
Konsep penebusan dosa ini, adalah bagian dari ajaran Kristen yang
membuat mumet saudara saudara umat lain untuk mengerti. Juga sebagian
umat Kristen sendiri masih mumet.
Misalnya, apakah penebusan ini juga berlaku bagi semua umat, atau
hanya mereka yang dipermandikan sebagai Kristen. kalau dipikir,
Kristus tak mengenal perbedaan antara Kristen dan Non-Kristen, karena
istilah Kristen belum ada.
Atau, mana yang lebih berbobot dalam membuka jalan ke surga, dharmaku
(sebagaimana ajaran Buddha) atau penebusan Kristus? Banyak kenalan
saya, yang sangat memandang enteng dosa, karena beranggapan, kita
tokh telah ditebusnya. Atau dengan mengaku dosa, karena "Kristus tokh
akan menebusku".
Kalau saya tak salah menangkap, konsep penebusan ini, terutama
dikembangkan oleh murid murid Kristus dalam perjalanannya ke Yunani,
jadi setelah Kristus wafat.
Mungkin ada saudara pakar Kristiani yang mampu menerangkan, konsep
ini adalah bagian dari wejangan Kristus selama Dia hidup?
Salam pencerahan
Danardono
----------------------
As a historical category, the term "Enlightenment" refers to a series
of changes in European thought and letters. It is one of the few
historical categories that was coined by the people who lived through
the era (most historical categories, such as "Renaissance," "early
modern," "Reformation," "Tokugawa Enlightenment," etc., are made up
by historians after the fact). When the writers, philosophers and
scientists of the eighteenth century referred to their activities as
the "Enlightenment," they meant that they were breaking from the past
and replacing the obscurity, darkness, and ignorance of European
thought with the "light" of truth.
Although the Enlightenment is one of the few self-named historical
categories, determining the beginning of the Enlightenment is a
difficult affair, as we noted earlier in this module. Not only can we
not easily find a beginning to the Enlightenment, we can't really
identify an end point either. For we still more or less live in an
Enlightenment world; while philosophers and cultural historians have
dubbed the late nineteenth and all of the twentieth century as "post-
Enlightenment," we still walk around with a world view largely based
on Enlightenment thought.
So in the spirit of not dating the Enlightenment, we will simply
refer to the changes in European thought in the seventeenth century
as "Seventeenth Century Enlightenment Thought," with the
understanding that our use of the term may invite criticism.
The main components of Enlightenment thought are as follows:
The universe is fundamentally rational, that is, it can be
understood through the use of reason alone;
Truth can be arrived at through empirical observation, the use of
reason, and systematic doubt;
Human experience is the foundation of human understanding of truth;
authority is not to be preferred over experience;
All human life, both social and individual, can be understood in the
same way the natural world can be understood; once understood, human
life, both social and individual, can be manipulated or engineered in
the same way the natural world can be manipulated or engineered;
Human history is largely a history of progress;
Human beings can be improved through education and the development
of their rational facilities;
Religious doctrines have no place in the understanding of the
physical and human worlds;
There are two distinct developments in Enlightenment thought: the
scientific revolution which resulted in new systems of understanding
the physical world (this is covered in a later chapter), and the
redeployment of the human sciences that apply scientific thinking to
what were normally interpretive sciences. In the first, the two great
innovations were the development of empirical thought and the
mechanistic world view. Empiricism is based on the notion that human
observation is a reliable indicator of the nature of phenomena;
repeated human observation can produce reasonable expectations about
future natural events. In the second, the universe is regarded as a
machine. It functions by natural and predictable rules; although God
created the universe, he does not interfere in its day to day
runnings. Once the world is understood as a machine, then it can be
manipulated and engineered for the benefit of humanity in the same
way as machines are.
The Human Sciences
These ideas were steadily exported to the human sciences as well.
In theories of personality, human development, and social mechanics,
seventeenth century thinkers moved away from religious and moral
explanations of human behavior and interactions and towards an
empirical analysis and mechanistic explanation of the laws of human
behavior and interaction.
Thomas Hobbes
The first major thinker of the seventeenth century to apply new
methods to the human sciences was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) whose
book Leviathan is one of the most revolutionary and influential works
on political theory in European history. Hobbes was greatly
interested in the new sciences; he spent some time in Italy with
Galileo and eagerly read the work of William Harvey, who was applying
the new physical science methods to human physiology. After the
English Civil War, Hobbes determined that political philosophy had to
be seriously revised. The old political philosophy, which relied on
religion, ethics, and interpretation, had produced what he felt was a
singular disaster in English history. He proposed that political
philosophy should be based on the same methods of exposition and
explanation as were being applied to the physical sciences.
When he applied these explanatory principles to politics and
states, he arrived at two radical and far-reaching conclusions:
All human law derives from natural law; when human law departed from
natural law, disaster followed;
All monarchs ruled not by the consent of heaven, but by the consent
of the people.
These were radical ideas. In the first, Hobbes believed that human
beings were material, physical objects that were ruled by material,
physical laws. Everything that human beings feel, think, and judge,
are simply physical reactions to external stimuli. Sensation produces
feeling, and feeling produces decision, and decision produces action.
We are all, then, machines. The fundamental motivation that spurs
human beings on is selfishness: all human beings wish to maximize
their pleasure and minimize their pain. As long as political
philosophy is built on some other principle, such as morality, the
human inclination to selfishness will always result in tragedy.
Since all human beings are selfish, this means that no person is
really safe from the predations of his or her fellow beings. In its
natural state, humanity is at war with itself. Individuals battle
other individuals in a perpetual struggle for advantage, power, and
gain. Hobbes argued that the society was a group of selfish
individuals that united into a single body in order to maximize their
safety-- to protect themselves from one another. The primary purpose
of society is to maximize the happiness of its individuals. At some
early point, individuals gathered into a society and agreed to
a "social contract" that stipulated the laws and rules they would all
live by.
>From the title page to Leviathan
The title page illustrates Hobbes's attitude towards authority and
the dependence of the human community on that authority.
Human beings, however, could not be trusted simply to live by
their agreements. For this reason, authority was created in order to
enforce the terms of the social contract. The creation of authority,
by which Hobbes meant a monarch, transformed society into a state .
For Hobbes, humanity is better off living under the circumscribed
freedoms of a monarchy rather than the violent anarchy of a
completely equal and free life.
Using this reasoning, Hobbes argued for unquestioning obedience of
authority. In a twist of fate, however, both his methods of inquiry
and his basic assumptions would form the basis of arguments against
absolute authority.
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Jewish philosopher living in the
Netherlands who applied the new sciences to questions of ethics and
philosophy. His most famous work, the Ethics , attempts to use a
system of demonstration first outlined by Francis Bacon and fully
theorized by Ren� Descartes that begins with certain definitions and
draws from these consequent axioms and corollaries. His basic
definition of good ("The highest good of the mind is knowledge of God
and the highest virtue of the mind is to know God") formed the
foundation of all of his ethical statements, including some highly
controversial statements ("Pity is not a virtue"). The work was
extraordinarily controversial, for from his base definitions he
derived the notion that God and nature were essentially identical. He
argued the same thing that the Greek philosopher Parmenides did
almost two thousand years earlier: there is one and only one thing in
the universe and that one thing is God. Everything else is simply a
part of God. Any proposition concerning the physical is, then, a
proposition about the nature of God. For Spinoza the new physical
sciences were, by and large, coterminous with theology. This position
would be reiterated by Isaac Newton and the deists, who argued that
understanding the rational workings of the universe would also mean
understanding the rational workings of its creator, God.
Like Hobbes, Spinoza believed that human action was fundamentally
mechanistic. Human actions resulted from two things: the external
environment and internal passions. The relationship between the
environment, passions, and human action was a mechanistic
relationship; all human actions, then, could be explained in terms of
laws. The fundamental drive that animates all human beings is the
effort to preserve themselves and their own autonomy in relation to
external things. However, the one area of human activity that is free
from the influence of the external environment and human passions is
rational thought; the more that thought is disengaged from the
external world and human passsion, that is, the more abstract that
thought is, the more free the individual. Human freedom, for Spinoza,
existed only in abstract thinking.
In political theory, Spinoza argued that human beings
fundamentally act in accordance with natural law. Like Hobbes,
Spinoza believed that human beings pursue their own self-
preseveration. In a natural state, the only "wrong" that a human
being can commit is an action that results in his or her destruction
or downfall. Since human beings cannot preserve themselves in
isolation, they form societies by which individual "right" is
subsumed under "common right," a notion very similar to Hobbes'
social contract. The means by which a society enforces its common
right on the individual is "dominion" (in Latin, "imperium").
Dominion takes three forms: dominion by the multitude (democracy), by
a select few (aristocracy), or by a single individual (monarchy). The
concepts of right and wrong, justice and injustice are only
established when the common right is articulated through dominion;
that is, when a ruler asserts something as right or wrong, it is then
right or wrong (in nature there is no right or wrong, justice or
injustice). The relationship between the right (power) of the
individual and the right of the dominion is an inverse relationship:
the more power that accrues to individuals, the less is available to
the dominion; the more power that accrues to authorities, the less is
available to individuals. Surprisingly, Spinoza implies that
democracy is the best way to balance individual and common right
since it more closely guarantees that the beliefs of the multitude
will correspond with the beliefs and actions of the dominion.
John Locke
The last important philosopher, besides Pascal and Descartes, of
human sciences in the seventeenth century was John Locke (1632-1704).
Locke was steeped in the new physical sciences; he was an avid reader
of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, and he was a close friend of
Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry. He also read
Pascal and Descartes avidly. He wrote two far-reaching and massively
influential works on human sciences, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises on Government (1690).
The Essay takes as its subject human psychology and cognition; it
is, undoubtedly, the first European work on human cognition. Locke
applied the new science to explaining the human mind itself and all
its operations; he started with a radical definition of the human
mind. For Locke, the human mind enters the world with no pre-formed
ideas whatsoever. The human mind at birth is a blank, a tabula rasa
(erased board). Human sensation: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and
especially vision filled the empty mind with objects of sensation.
>From these sensations, humans eventually derive a sense of order and
rationality. All human thought, then, and all human passion is
ultimately derived from sensation and sensation alone. In Locke's
view, the human mind is completely empirical. Not only is he arguing
that the best knowledge is empirical knowledge, he was arguing that
the only knowledge is empirical knowledge; there is no other kind.
One of the consequences of this empirical view of humans means
that every human being enters the world with all the same capacities.
No one is by virtue of birth more moral or knowledgeable than anyone
else. Since all moral behavior arises from one's empirical
experiences, that means that immoral behavior is primarily a product
of the environment rather than the individual. If you accept that
line of reasoning, that means that you can change moral and
intellectual outcomes in human development by changing the
environment. Locke proposed that education above everything else was
responsible for forging the moral and intellectual character of
individuals; he proposed in part an extension of education to every
member of society. This view of education still dominates Western
culture to this day.
In the Two Treatises , Locke argued that government and authority
was based on natural law. Unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that natural
law dictated that all human beings were fundamentally equal; he
derived this argument from his theories of human development. Since
every human being walked into the world with the same capacities as
every other human being, that meant that inequality was an unnatural
result of the environments that individuals are forced to live in, a
belief that still underlies the Western notion of human development.
Human beings have a natural inclination to preserve their equality
and independence, since these are natural aspects of humanness. For
Locke, humans enter into social contracts only to help adjudicate
disputes between individuals or groups. Absolute power, then, is an
unnatural development in human history.
For Locke, the purpose of authority is to protect human equality
and freedom; this is why social groups agree to a "social contract"
that places an authority over them. When that authority ceases to
care for the welfare, independence, and equality of individual
humans, the social contract is broken and it is the duty of the
members of society to overthrow that ruler. This work was published
shortly after the Glorious Revolution and clearly reflects the
political fallout from that event. It would also serve as one of the
central influences in the formation of the American government.
Richard Hooker
----------------------------------------
--- In [email protected], "Ari Condro" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Konsep dosa asal memang dogma yang ada di agama Yahudi dan Kristen.
> Karena itulah pemaknaan peristiwa Adam dan Hawa itu diturunkan ke
> bumi itu beda pemaknaannya antara agama Islam dengan agama lainnya.
> Dalam khazanah islam dinamakan kisah-kisah Israiliyyat.
>
> (Anehnya dengan beban sejarah yang lebih ringan ini,
> kok dalam Islam, kita banyak mendengar wanita mengalami
> subordinasi ya .... Sayangnya lagi, banyak dari kita yang
> tidak bisa mengakui hal ini. Padahal dari saudara2 kita
> yang kristen justru banyak masalah yang telah mengalami pencerahan).
>
> Kalau konsep penebusan dosa itu setahu saya malah hanya di agama
Kristen
> aja.
>
> salam,
> Ari Condro
> Pak Danardhono ikutan donk .....
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Lina Dahlan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> Dari mana dasarnya mbak kalau dikatakan Kitab AlQur'an menulis
> tentang dosa awal yang dilakukan Adam dan Hawa, dimana memang pada
> dasarnya HAWA YANG PERTAMA KALI TERGODA?
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