Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self

17th-Century Religious Versions of the Self (1x2)

Air date: Jan 08, 2000

This lecture examines two great religious writers, the English Protestant John Bunyan and the French Catholic Blaise Pascal. Enlightenment thinkers would insist on the positive value of this world, would make pride a virtue rather than a sin, and would seek fulfillment in social interaction, not in self-disciplining solitude.