Counter-Enlightenments

From the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Graeme Garrard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415187251
• eBook ISBN: 9781134662234
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The Enlightenment and its legacy are still actively debated, with the Enlightenment acting as a key organizing concept in philosophy, social theory and the history of ideas.

Counter-Enlightenments is the first full-length study to deal with the history and development of counter-enlightenment thought from its inception in the eighteenth century right through to the present. Engaging in a critical dialogue with Isaiah Berlin's work, this book analyzes the concept of counter-enlightenment and some of the most important issues and problems it raises.

Graeme Garrard explores the diverse forms of thought in this field, with a wide-ranging review of the principle figures of the past two hundred and fifty years, and an incisive assessment of the persuasiveness of the most common and important criticisms of the Enlightenment.

1 Introduction

Like it or not, the West today (and not only the West) is a legacy of what has come to be known in English as ‘the Enlightenment’. Many of the values, practices and institutions of our present civilisation are rooted in the eighteenth century, which helped to liberate a vast human potential that determined much of the shape and direction of the world we now inhabit. Michel Foucault’s claim that the Enlightenment ‘has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today’ is beyond serious dispute.¹

Assessing this legacy is much more difficult than merely acknowledging its scale and significance. On the one hand, the Enlightenment was a ‘great leap forward’ in many ways, leading to an unprecedented expansion of scientific discovery and application, political reform, social liberation and individual empowerment. Its legacy of religious toleration has been a precious gift for reasons made obvious by the long history of religious persecutions and crusades in the pre-Enlightenment West and the fundamentalist excesses so common in our time. Its faith in the potential of modern science to enhance human knowledge – and thereby power – has been vindicated to a degree far exceeding the wildest dreams of the most optimistic philosophes. On the other hand, the experience of the twentieth century has revealed the dark side of knowledge to a degree that may have startled many of the Enlightenment’s eighteenth-century proponents. With increased freedom and mobility, the spread of literacy, the decline in infant mortality, the prolongation of human life and the alleviation of physical suffering through modern medicine have come a potentially catastrophic degradation of the natural environment, the depletion of vital and irreplaceable natural resources, the advent of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the dystopic possibilities of genetic engineering. The destructive potential at the disposal of the human appetite for power, cruelty, stupidity and hatred is now enormous and growing. In addition, the increase in individual freedom of conscience, religious expression, mobility and self-determination that the Enlightenment helped to facilitate has undermined many traditional sources of conflict while fostering others. For many today, the balance between the costs and the benefits of living in an enlightened civilisation – if we really can call ours such – cannot sustain the buoyant optimism usually associated with the Enlightenment. For increasing numbers of others, the balance clearly favours a deeply pessimistic – even apocalyptic – reading of the trajectory of human history since the eighteenth century. Either way, few now retain the relatively simple faith in science, progress, reason and the natural goodness of human beings commonly associated with the age we now call the Enlightenment. Given this scepticism, it is hardly surprising that the re-emergence of ‘enlightenment’ as a key organising concept in philosophy, social and critical theory, and the history of ideas since the Second World War has been shadowed by a proliferation of new forms of Counter- Enlightenment thought, resulting in yet another round in the continuing war between the Enlightenment and its enemies.

Although criticism of the Enlightenment has been a central theme in twentieth-century thought – particularly in intellectual movements such as critical theory, hermeneutics, pragmatism, feminism, post-modernism and communitarianism – and the term ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ is now quite well established and widely used,² the concept of Counter-Enlightenment is underdeveloped, lagging at least a generation behind the scholarly literature on the Enlightenment, the sophistication of which has increased dramatically in the past quarter of a century. Indeed, the only significant scholarly study devoted exclusively to this subject in general is Isaiah Berlin’s 1973 essay ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, which is the necessary starting point of any discussion on the concept in English ³.

As far as I have been able to discover, the term ‘the Counter-Enlightenment’ made its first appearance in English in William Barrett’s 1949 Partisan Review essay on ‘Art, Aristocracy and Reason’, where it is mentioned only in passing.⁴ He also employs it as follows in his popular 1958 book on existentialism, where he writes: ‘Existentialism is the counter-Enlightenment come at last to philosophic expression; and it demonstrates beyond anything else that the ideology of the Enlightenment is thin, abstract, and therefore dangerous.’ ⁵ Barratt says little about Enlightenment criticism beyond this. The German expression ‘Gegen-Aufklärung’ is older, probably coined by Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century, although he only uses it in passing.⁶

The first significant use of the term in English occurs in a chapter on ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ in Lewis White Beck’s study of Early German Philosophy (1969), which is about Counter-Enlightenment in Germany, since it focuses exclusively on J. G. Hamann, J. G. Herder and F. H. Jacobi.⁷ He argues that, at the height of the Aufklärung, ‘there was a reaction which I shall call the “Counter-Enlightenment” ’.⁸ After decades of enlightened despotism under Frederick II (1712–1786), Beck claims, a counter-movement arose in Germany attacking what it saw as Frederick’s soulless, secular authoritarian state. This enlightened conception of the state reflected the mechanical Newtonian view of disenchanted nature that dominated Enlightenment thought in the eighteenth century. In opposition to this, the ‘faith and feeling’ philosophers of the Counter-Enlightenment, epitomised by Hamann, favoured a more organic conception of social and political life, a more vitalistic view of nature, and an appreciation for beauty and the spiritual life of man that, they thought, had been neglected in the eighteenth century.

It has only been since the republication in 1981 of Berlin’s essay ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ in a popular collection of essays that the term has been widely used.⁹ Like Beck, Berlin claims that the Germans ‘rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment’.¹⁰ Both believe that it was in late-eighteenth century Germany that Counter-Enlightenment thought really took off, starting with the Königsberg philosopher Hamann, ‘the most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment’.¹¹ This German reaction to the imperialistic universalism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, which had been forced on them first by the Francophile Frederick II, then by the armies of Revolutionary France, and finally by Napoleon, was crucial to the epochal shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at the time, leading eventually to Romanticism. According to Berlin, the surprising and unintended consequence of this revolt against the Enlightenment has been pluralism, which owes more to the Enlightenment’s enemies than it does to its proponents, most of whom were monists whose political, intellectual and ideological offspring have often been terror and totalitarianism ¹².

In Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (1983), Steven Seidman distinguishes between three distinct strands of Counter- Enlightenment thought, only one of which is primarily German: Conservatives (e.g. Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, Edmund Burke, the Historical School of Jurisprudence); German Romantics (e.g. Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich von Schelling, Auguste Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg [‘Novalis’], Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher); and French Revolutionaries (e.g. François Noël Babeuf and Louis-Auguste Blanqui).¹³ Rejecting the stark dualism of Enlightenment versus Counter-Enlightenment, Seidman recasts the latter as a transitional phase between a traditional social order that was in retreat in the eighteenth century and an emergent new form of industrial civilisation that typified the nineteenth century. The Counter-Enlightenment was a ‘transmitter’ of innovations in social theory originally made by the Enlightenment, refining and adapting them in the process. For example, Seidman argues that the Enlightenment rejected the methodological individualism and atomistic assumptions of classical social contract theory in favour of a belief in ‘the interpenetration of the individual and society’.¹⁴ Rather than rejecting these views, the Enlightenment’s enemies adopted them and ‘insinuated them into the centre of the intellectual milieu of the nineteenth century. In short, the counter-Enlightenment formed a bridge between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which was of immense significance.’¹⁵ For Seidman, Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment are forms of communitarianism, united in their basic belief in social holism, but divided in their particular views on culture and politics. The real difference between the Enlightenment and its enemies is that the latter replaced the pluralistic ideal of the Enlightenment with ‘the ideal of a uniform and common culture which integrates and harmonizes the interests of the individual and the community’¹⁶.

Like Seidman, John Gray has also emphasised the continuity between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, which he regards as currents of thought ‘watered by the same stream of humanism, which flowed into and strengthened one another’.¹⁷ For example, a belief in a universal human narrative is common to both the Enlightenment and its reactionary opponents such as Joseph de Maistre. According to Gray, both belong to a single tradition of Western thought and culture that he traces back to antiquity. The differences that separate them exist within a broad consensus about the narrative structure of history, the unity of truth and the objectivity and compatibility of values that was not seriously challenged until late modernity, above all by Nietzsche.

Darrin McMahon, taking his cue from historian Robert Darnton, has recently examined the early enemies of the Enlightenment in France from below, documenting the existence of a long-forgotten ‘Grub Street’ literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries aimed at the philosophes.¹⁸ In Enemies of the Enlightenment (2001) he delves into the obscure and at times unseemly world of the ‘low Counter-Enlightenment’ that attacked the encyclopédistes and fought an often dirty battle to prevent the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the eighteenth century.¹⁹ By extending it both back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of ‘Grub Street’, this approach marks a major advance in scholarship "ORG_584">on Counter-Enlightenment thought.

All of these authors end their accounts fairly abruptly in the early nineteenth century, thereby reinforcing the idea that ‘the Counter- Enlightenment’ is a period term like ‘the Enlightenment’, which it is not. Although the trend of recent scholarship has been to broaden the geographical, intellectual and social range of Counter-Enlightenment thought beyond Germany, its temporal scope remains narrowly circumscribed. No balanced account of this subject can ignore the fact that criticism of the Enlightenment has returned in the twentieth century with a vengeance. One of the principal objectives of the present study is to challenge the idea of the Counter-Enlightenment as a single historical movement, more or less restricted to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I do so primarily by focusing as much on the Enlightenment’s twentieth-century critics as on its earlier opponents. Each of the Enlightenment’s enemies depicted it as they saw it or wanted others to see it, resulting in a vast range of portraits, many of which are not only different but incompatible. The Counter-Enlightenment, understood as a single movement, is a fiction, and not a particularly useful one at that. There were – and are – many Counter- Enlightenments.²⁰ This is most apparent when seen from a perspective that Introduction encompasses the full breadth of Enlightenment criticism in Germany and beyond, and from the mid-eighteenth century to the present.

Cleaning the stables

A major obstacle impeding intelligent discussion of this subject is the confusing and inconsistent use of terms, a problem that not only divides writers from each other but often divides them against themselves. Above all, the interchangeable use of ‘enlightenment’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘the enlightenment’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ utterly confounds sensible discussion of this subject. Examples abound. In a single passage in his study of Nietzsche and the Political, for example, Daniel Conway refers to the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’, ‘historical enlightenment’, the ‘dream of the Enlightenment’ and the ‘image of Enlightenment’.²¹ In an otherwise admirable translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, A. V. Miller renders ‘die Aufklärung’ as ‘Enlightenment’, ‘the Enlightenment’ and ‘the enlightenment’, all on a single page, thereby imposing distinctions on Hegel that are not at all apparent in his German text.²² Charles Frankel’s The Faith of Reason contains the following sentence: ‘It was in France that enlightenment had its most lively career, and it was from France, which was the social centre of the Enlightenment, that such tenets of enlightenment as the belief in progress were most widely disseminated. The Enlightenment was a movement that transcended national boundaries; it fostered and was in turn sustained by a European culture.’²³ George Friedman gives us the following usages, all in one paragraph: ‘The crises of Enlightenment . . . the purpose of Enlightenment . . . the crisis of the Enlightenment . . . the crisis of Enlightenment.’ ²⁴ One might go on indefinitely.

It is not at all clear to what the terms ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘the enlightenment’ refer. They add nothing but confusion to the debate and are therefore best avoided. I shall restrict myself to ‘enlightenment’ (no definite article, small ‘e’) as a generic concept referring to both the general goal and the process of replacing darkness with light, taken metaphorically to refer to wisdom or insight (however defined) replacing ignorance or a lack of understanding, and ‘the Enlightenment’ (definite article, capital ‘E’) to designate one historically specific conception of this process, usually associated with Europe and America after (roughly) 1750, with many national variations (e.g. the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, the German Enlightenment). A concept offers only a vague and general account of something, whereas a conception is a specific interpretation of it.²⁵ While there is one generic concept of enlightenment, there are many particular conceptions of it. For example, we may speak, as the philosopher and classical scholar Hans-Georg Gadamer does, of ‘the enlightenment of the classical world’ (‘Die antike Aufklärung’²⁶) when, as he puts it, ‘the view of life enshrined in the epics and myths of Homer and Hesiod was dissolved by the new passion for discovery’, epitomised by the allegory of the cave in book seven of Plato’s Republic.²⁷ Another conception of enlightenment may be found in Buddhism, where it refers to the ‘experience in which one is said to “see” things as they really are, rather than as they appear to be. To have gained enlightenment is to have seen through the misleading textures of illusion and ignorance, through the dark veils of habitual comprehension, to the light and clarity of truth itself.’²⁸ The necessary path to enlightenment thus understood is through spiritual self-transcendence, something completely missing from the conception that emerged in Europe and America in the eighteenth century, epitomised by, although by no means confined to, the Paris-based philosophes such as Diderot, d’Alembert, Voltaire and Condorcet. This conception emphasised the centrality of reason and sensory experience as sources of knowledge, looked to modern science as the principal vehicle of human progress, and championed religious toleration. Each of these particular conceptions (ancient Greek, Buddhist, eighteenth-century European – to name just a few) exhibit distinctive, even incompatible, fea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• 2: First Shots
• 3: Counter-Enlightenment And Counter-Revolution
• 4: The Return of Faith And Feeling
• 5: The Strange Case of Friedrich Nietzsche And The Enlightenment
• 6: Enlightened Totalitarianism
• 7: The Postmodern Challenge
• 8: From Enlightenment to Nothingness
• 9: Conclusion Hits And Misses
• Notes
• Bibliography