That error could be of interest to Freemasons and Illuminati as a topic becomes evident when one sees it in the context of concepts such as prejudice, ignorance, and gullibility. The perfection of the human being was understood as the detachment from prejudices – from errors –, as overcoming ignorance and as a fight against gullibility. In 1785 there was a discussion among the Illuminati of Gotha about how one should understand error. Prince August of Saxe-Gotha transfers Voltaire’s two types of imagination to two types of errors, using the distinction made by the physicist Charles Du Fay, who distinguished resin electricity (électricité résineuse) with its negative charge from glass electricity (électricité vitreuse) with its positive charge. So August suggests that there are positive and negative errors: the positive errors are attractive, they attract. In this case the cause of error lies on our side, on the side of the subjects: because of certain defects in the knower, facts are not correctly recognized. The negative errors, on the other hand, repel: there it is due to the nature of the representations of the facts themselves, which have pitfalls or are distorted by hallucinations, that we go wrong.
University of Erfurt, Germany
Chapter Title
Positive and Negative Error. A Debate in the Illuminati Order
Authors
Martin Mulsow
Language
Italian
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0266-4.09
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2023
Copyright Information
© 2023 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Book Title
Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
Authors
Marco Faini, Marco Sgarbi
Peer Reviewed
Number of Pages
145
Publication Year
2023
Copyright Information
© 2023 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0266-4
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0265-7
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0266-4
eISBN (epub)
979-12-215-0267-1
Series Title
Knowledge and its Histories