Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Velocity.

Thank you to all the people out there that support the show on Patreon.

Can never do this without you. Also, there's a new way to contribute on the website.

People have been requesting an option like this for a long time.

Finally decided to make it happen. It's sort of a one-time pay-what-you-think-the-show is worth

to you model. The idea is that Patreon's a way to support the show with new episodes moving

forward. This is a way for people to contribute based on what they think the back catalogs

done for him so far. So thank you for everything. Today's episode is one in a series on the work of

Henry Bergson, and we begin today by offering some important context by looking at the work of Max

Weber. I hope you love the show today. So when the enlightenment began, the hope was that through

the process of scientific rationality, we would be gradually but steadily moving forward towards

several very important goals. Freedom on a level never before witnessed by human beings.

The promise of societies with levels of equality never before witnessed.

Through the ongoing process of using science to refine the systems of thought that surrounded us,

the enlightenment promised higher levels of efficiency, more sophisticated levels of technology,

what the enlightenment sold to people was the expectation that every day that a human being lived

henceforth would be a day lived in the direction of progress, constantly moving forward towards

a better world. Now one thing that's absolutely clear is that when it comes to delivering on a lot

of these promises, credit where credits do, the enlightenment did what it set out to do, and it did

it pretty well. Not many people questioned the level of impact the enlightenment had, because I mean,

quite frankly, if it produced little to no results, not only would there not be as many naysayers,

but there'd be no reason to delineate between pre-modern and modern if we weren't talking about two very

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