History and the Spheres of Life: The Framework of Scottish Enlightenment Thought
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/isegoria.2016.054.03Keywords:
Scottish Enlightenment, History, Perfectibility, Civil Society, Moral SenseAbstract
I would like to expose that historicity, as the continuous process of adaptation of human life to specific problems (social, climatic, economic ...), is the framework where the moral work of the Scottish Enlightenment is built. The endless work of adaptation to the environment (which usually is understood by means of a conception of history by stages) is made without a clear idea or an initial design: our laws, rules, and moral world, are the unintended consequences of decisions made without a previous plan (neither divine, nor rational, nor natural). Such historical process of contextualization, which starts by means of human perfectibility, ultimately involves attention to the different interests and spheres of life. That situation provokes that the moral reflection remains parceled out in the small areas where these interests appear. This is the reason leading to the Scottish Enlightenment to seek some kind of universality which will be found on a moral sense that is naturally pleased with the artificial and historic public good.
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